Mutations, bad not good (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 16, 2011, 12:35 (4879 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

I have been attempting to pin Tony down on the subject of evolution, and submitted a simple theistic pattern: God created life and organized it in such a way that different forms succeeded one another.-Dhw: There are no assumptions here, and I am only concerned with the overall pattern, not with the details. I now have two questions for you: 1) Can you find fault with this pattern? 2) Can you suggest another that fits in equally well with the three sets of experiences and observations I have listed above? [These were parentage, adaptations, and similarities between humans and earlier mammals.]-TONY: To the general patterns, I do not now, nor have I ever had any real argument against them. That is not the fault I find in evolutionary theory, and never has been. I find that the idea makes sense on many fundamental levels. As I said, though, I think the current paradigm makes far, far too many assumptions. By the same token, I put no more stock in the current wave of fundamentalist creationism than I do in the current Theory of Evolution.-I feel we are moving ever closer now. It might be useful if you were to compile a simple list of these "assumptions", but I'll put in my own pennyworth first. Areas of the current theory which I find to be suspect include: 1) innovations; 2) time scales; 3) gradualism (punctuated equilibrium seems far more convincing to me); 4) the obsession with Natural Selection as a creative force, which it clearly is not. More common ground here?-In terms of the debate on design, at the risk of being a bore let me repeat yet again that the mechanism that has enabled evolution to take place seems to me to be far too complex to attribute to sheer chance. However, I cannot visualize a designer less complex than the design, and so if it is possible to believe in a spontaneously generated designer (or however one wishes to describe a UI), one might just as well believe in a spontaneously generated evolutionary mechanism. Back to the agnostic Square One.