Innovation (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 21, 2013, 17:15 (4003 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: A creationist evolutionist seems to me like a contradiction in terms.-DAVID: I sense that God has to intervene for major jumps forward in speciation. Sure that is a form of creationism, obviously; but my variation on the creation theme is that God lets adapability go as far as it can before His tweaking if necessary. God works through an evolutionary process. He did the same thing with the Universe and the Earth. They both went through evolutionary processes.-If God intervenes for "major jumps forward in speciation", that is not just a "form of creationism" ... it IS creationism. As for the Universe and the Earth, I'm sure agnostics and atheists would agree that they evolved. I suspect that a creationist evolutionist would have a different concept of evolution, though.
 
DAVID: I have a clearly defined starting point, with everything making sense after accepting that starting point. Yes I know there has to be the famous leap at first, but everyting is so logical after that. Your approach stays higgily/piggily from beginning to end. [...] We live in an organized universe, on an organized Earth with organized living biology, and you want it all to start disorganized at first cause. What rules does your glob of energy follow at its very beginning, or hasn't it made up any as yet? You can only have it one of two ways, organized or disorganized, or please describe a middle ground.-The middle ground is evolution, which you yourself believe in so long as it's directed by your God. And it combines organization and disorganization. Non-divine evolution creates the same order as yours, out of disorder but without any anthropocentric teleology. I didn't realize that you thought of your God as a glob of energy with a beginning. I thought we'd agreed that the starting point was eternal and infinite energy, which for all we know has been spawning universes for ever and ever, yours with rules, mine without. That, at least, would be my starting point. The only universe we know is our own, and it's filled with masses of matter which appear and disappear in just the same way as species here on Earth. How much of this appearing and disappearing matter is essential to life on Earth I have no idea, especially since about 90% of it is apparently unknown to us. Yes, we have fine tuning for life, and in my "middle ground" hypothesis, it has evolved through non-conscious energy acquiring awareness from within changing matter, and learning to cooperate with other forms of matter whose internal energy has acquired consciousness. Cooperating intelligences are the driving forces of this evolution, and they create functioning order, but with no overriding purpose other than life itself. You have imposed a purpose on evolution, the production of humans, but you have no explanation for HOW your God intervenes, and you cannot link the endless comings and goings of species to your teleology. You see only organization, whereas I see order AND disorder in the universe and life on Earth. Or perhaps you know exactly why white dwarfs, red giants, black holes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, floods are all essential for the production of humans, as was the extinction of the dinosaurs and the dodos. If I believed in your God, I would say that unpredictable disorder was in fact part of the great entertainment. If I believed in chance, I would say that during an eternity of infinite material combinations, one would inevitably arise that would lead to order and life, but with no overriding purpose (hence the higgledy-piggledy bush). If I believed in the panpsychist hypothesis (whether theistic or atheistic), I would say that the universe, life and evolution have followed the patterns devised by individual intelligences cooperating to produce order out of disorder, again with no overriding purpose (other than entertaining your God in the theistic version). All three hypotheses demand an initial leap of faith, and then the world as we know it, or rather as we INTERPRET it (order for you, order and disorder for me), follows on quite logically from that particular starting point.