David's theory of evolution: James A. Shapiro's view (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, February 05, 2020, 19:58 (1751 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: As is quite clear, I am not sure God has precise control over ongoing environmental and cosmological individual events in ongoing processes He set up originally, as the Chixculub comment shows. Your desire to know God precisely is an impossible task. You always push for guesses.

dhw: It's quite clear that it's not clear. I’m sorry, but when someone advances a theory, I push for answers to the questions that theory raises. You do exactly the same when I present you with alternatives. According to you, your God either preprogrammed the first cells with answers to all the problems bacteria would face for the rest of time, and with all the innovations that would lead to new species, or he continually dabbled. You describe him as “knowing exactly what He wants and sees to it it happens”. Evolution is the history of ever changing life forms that cope or fail to cope with ever changing environments. You cannot separate the one from the other.

Your view of evolution is not mine if this is your complete view. Evolution is a progressively complexifing process which loses less complex forms along the way. 99% are gone, and that had purpose, not your negative connotation. I've separated nothing. You fail to see the purpose, as you recognize human uniqueness and then downgrade its philosophical importance in understanding what our evolution implies.

dhw: In the case of bacteria, how could your God possibly preprogramme solutions to every problem if he did not know the problems in advance?

Bacteria, as living-on-their-own organisms, have only a few responses they need and God would easily know them as I do and have enumerated in the past, all fully discussed.

dhw: The same applies to all the innovations and major adaptations which you insist preceded the relevant changes in the environment. Why are you so afraid of facing up to this question and to other questions related to your highly personal theory of evolution? And if your own brilliant mind is incapable of finding any logical answers to them, why are you so afraid of alternatives that do provide logical answers?

As I've written, when an organism can do a new series of processes, as a whole body movement or as the most complicated new physiology (whales) they must have all the facilities in place to start with. Your Darwinian approach to evolution, although you doubt chance changes, still expect necessary design issues to be left to the organisms themselves as if they can foretell the new challenges. Four-legged mammals jump in the water and arrange for a change? And produce the gaps in design of body and new physiology. Totally illogical thinking.