David's theory of evolution: God's error corrections III (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, October 19, 2020, 01:16 (1495 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I agree that if God exists he wanted to create ALL of the process of evolution, and that includes ALL of the species that had nothing whatsoever to do with humans. He created or gave free rein to millions of “bushes of life”, not just ours, and they were all self-sufficient.

David: You cannot disconnect the stepwise development evolving humans from bacteria as one process.

Read Talbott: file:///C:/Users/pacemaker/Desktop/Stephen%20L.%20Talbott.html

"If we are willing to inquire honestly whether evolution presents us with a meaningful narrative, then we must keep in mind that the later parts of any such narrative are often the key to understanding earlier parts.

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"When, then, we reflect upon the incredibly complex, end-directed tasks expertly carried out by vast collections of molecules even in the simplest and most primitive cells, it is natural to call to mind the eons of evolutionary transformation that have led from single cells to our own experience as conscious and willful agents pursuing our own meaningful tasks. Does the human outcome illuminate primordial origins?

"It would, of course, be a fatal error to collapse all distinctions and talk about those early cells in the same way we talk about conscious human cognition and behavior. But the error would be equally egregious if we simply ignored the evident relation and historical continuity between the earliest forms of life and ourselves.

"And, in fact, the evolutionary outcome does throw an intensely revelatory light upon the earlier circumstances. Our own bodies contain countless cells that function in many respects just like the most primitive cells we know. That is, they are engaged in meaningful, future-oriented activity — as, for example, in cell division — where part-processes are disciplined by their larger context. But, in our case, there is a still larger context whereby our highest capacities can, in some limited yet powerful respects, become the “guiding forces” of all that cellular activity.

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"We can hardly help asking: What are the guiding intentions in those many end-directed aspects of our physiology that are not now under our conscious control. And the question naturally carries over to the most primitive, single-celled forms of life we know, where we find the same well-coordinated and purposive functioning as in the cells of our own bodies. What are their guiding intentions?

"The obvious next thing to ask at this point is whether our evolutionary origins can, with any reason at all, be thought of in the usual manner as mindless and meaningless. Or do those origins express high intentions that we humans, in consciously mastering our own bodies, and on our trajectory toward the future, have so far learned to touch only very lightly, being distracted as we now are by our abilities to toy mechanically with the exteriors of things?"

Comment: Talbott is telling us evolution has produced us as direct decedent relatives of bacteria. And you get all confused by the old and current bushes and what they mean.