DILEMMAS: my position clarified (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 04, 2014, 16:00 (3453 days ago) @ David Turell

I have tried to break various “dilemma” and “contingent evolution” posts down into three sections which seem to me to cover the dilemmas arising from David's latest mullings.-DAVID: I work under the assumption that evolution occurred. The science findings strongly suggest such a mechanism. Since I believe in God, I believe in a guided theistic evolution.[...]. These simple modifications [ant rafts, finches with longer beaks] are the only inventions that living organisms can do, if there is an IM, as epigentic research is finding.-And in response to Tony's “third way” you wrote: 
You are describing what I think of as micro-evolution, adaptive changes in fully established species. And this is all an inventive mechanism can do. We cannot excape the fact that the fossil rcord repeatedly tells us all new advanced species arrive full-blown, fully functional. This is the loud and clear message from the Cambrian Explosion.-Once more, then, despite the fact that “there is a whole layer of gene function we know nothing about” (26 October at 01.45), you know that living organisms are capable of only the simplest modifications - they can learn new tricks (ant rafts), or Nature will select longer beaks for certain environments. Do you stand by your (forgotten) agreement on 31 October that ants could build cities without divine guidance, or do you now believe God dabbled or preprogrammed those into the first cells, as he did with the monarch butterfly's four generation cycle and migration? A week ago, a mechanism capable of more than mere adaptation was “certainly possible”, but now we are seemingly back to every single innovation and virtually every natural wonder being either preprogrammed into the first living cells, or the result of divine dabbling. There is no inventive mechanism at all, since you happen to know the mechanism is incapable of inventing. (During this period of evolutionary stasis, nothing new has evolved, so presumably you know that what we see is all there will ever be, although we don't actually know what genes are capable of, let alone what will happen in the next thousand/million/billion years.) As for the Cambrian, do you really expect to find fossils of non-creatures? No matter what form of evolution you believe in, if you accept common descent, you accept that living creatures are descended from other living creatures, which seems to tie in with your comment below, that “contingent evolution means one step follows another”. Perhaps, though, in the light of the above comment on the Cambrian, you are coming round to embracing creationism.
 
DAVID: The entire bush of life provides a balance of nature. [...]-You think you have solved your dilemma of the higgledy-piggledy bush by convincing yourself that without every twiglet, the world would come to an end, and so God had to plan the four-generation cycle and migration of the monarch. The fact that Nature's “balance” has shifted seismically throughout life's history, with millions of species going extinct, and new organisms replacing old ones, makes no difference, because that was presumably also God's plan (he is, after all, in “total control” of evolution). Until we humans came on the scene, the rebalancing depended entirely on the workings of Nature. So do you believe your God preprogrammed/directed every single environmental change, extinction and innovation, both local and global, prior to the arrival of humans?
 
DAVID: To me contingent evolution means one step follows another. For Gould this meant a chance sequence. Evolution is either by chance or it is planned. There is no third way. -“Evolution is either by chance or it is planned” begs the question what aspect of evolution, and what sort of planning? A god who created an inventive mechanism to respond in different ways to random changes in the environment can be said to have planned evolution to provide an unpredictable variety of life forms. So there is overall planned randomness. Each individual innovation in itself requires planning, but if it is triggered by random changes in the environment, you have a mixture of chance and small-scale planning (perhaps by God, perhaps by an IM, depending on the range of its capabilities). Even the theory of random mutations - which all three of us reject - can be taken back to the beginning, if you think God planned a great big lucky dip, allowing Nature to do the rest. (I wonder how the enthusiastic Rev. Charles Kingsley interpreted Darwin's theory, since random mutations were then integral to it.) Or of course your God could have started out without a clue what he was doing, and dabbled as things developed - another mixture of chance and design. Planning entails purpose, but the sort of planning will depend on the sort of purpose. And attributing a purpose entails reading God's mind, which with your warnings against anthropomorphizing God, you would surely not advise us even to attempt.