DILEMMAS: my position clarified (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, November 07, 2014, 16:32 (3451 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: My point is that if you accept common descent, each new step (regardless of its initiator) would have taken place in existing, functioning organisms, so there won't be fossils of any non functional creatures. Since many species became extinct in a relatively short time, perhaps they were experiments that didn't work out, though the organisms were also full-blown and fully functional.-Your thinking is not complete. Non-functional as you imply means the organism never existed. Common descent is the passage of life from one existing form to another. Only functional forms pass life from a lesser level to a higher level. If non-func. forms existed even for a short while (which might be what you are thinking) then there should be fossils. 
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> dhw: It depends how you define balance. The planet has survived all the catastrophes and transformations that Nature has thrown at it, but it has not remained the same. Different forms of life have dominated at different periods, and the balance has constantly changed.-You have just made my point: at each period of history the Earth and life have maintained a careful successful balance. It must be one of the required pattern rules. We humans are screwing with it now, as we both note. -> 
> dhw: You are teasing me. One day it's “certainly possible” that the IM can do more than merely adapt, the next day it can't because God is in “total control”, the next day the universe may “run partially on its own”...In the context of theistic evolution, it's the part outside God's control that makes for the dilemma.-You are the one teasing. I see no way of solving the dilemma with the evidence we have.
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> DAVID: All planning requires the development of information. It must follow rules and guidelines to be coherent. 'Planning' always means prior design and purpose. That statement cannot be avoided. An IM must follow those rules.
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> No disagreement here. An IM's purpose would be to exploit new conditions to the advantage of the organism as a whole. It would follow the guidelines laid down by those conditions and by the limitations of its own potential. Your divine preprogramming or dabbling would follow the same purpose and guidelines.-Agreed-> David: I don't try to analyze His personality, as religions do, but if God thinks, and we are part of the universal consciousness, then we think just like He does. We plan like He plans. This has been my position all along.[/i]
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> dhw: So we can hypothesize that God may have designed an unpredictable game that would run itself for his entertainment, or may have had a vague idea of what he wanted but had to keep messing about to achieve it, or may have set the wheels in motion and then got bored with the whole spiel and left it to its own devices. Each of these hypotheses can be squared with the world and the bush we know and with God thinking as we think. Why confine yourself, then, to the hypotheses that God set out to create humans, and has always been “in total control” (or maybe not), and deliberately preprogrammed the monarch butterfly's life cycle in order to maintain the balance of the Earth?-For the simple reason that you and I exist and debate. Paul Davies observation that the arrival of sentient beings who can understand the workings of the universe, but who originated from rock and water is an extremely significant series of events, appearing to be against all odds. Why us? I still think there are only chance and design alternatives, or the picket fence!