Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, July 07, 2016, 12:35 (2842 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw; I don't know how being open to a possibility makes it a probability. My own mindset is “God is as possible as no-God”. And you still haven't explained why your belief makes your interpretation of God's intentions less shaky than mine. Perhaps you would like to withdraw this non sequitur instead of talking round it!
DAVID: I'm not talking, around it. We never get past the point of chance vs. design. You have not really offered a third way for designed organisms to appear, but have proposed that God might have given organisms a way to do it. So really for a proposed designer we both always come back to God. Which means you have a mental road block in fully accepting the idea that God can exist.-I fully accept the idea that God CAN exist, but not that he DOES exist. That would constitute belief. I am trying to find a logical explanation for the higgledy-piggledy course of evolution. If God exists, I can envisage him designing a mechanism which enables organisms to pursue their own path to survival and/or improvement (but occasionally dabbling). I do not see why my agnosticism makes this a more shaky hypothesis than yours, which entails God preprogramming or personally directing every innovation and natural wonder, extant and extinct, in the history of life on Earth in order to produce homo sapiens.
 
If God - a sourceless conscious mind - does not exist, at some stage matter must have developed some form of consciousness. You say later: “You really can't get rid of God, but won't accept Him.” Not quite. I can't get rid of consciousness, because I truly believe that the complexities of life and evolution are too great to have come about by chance. But what you call the ”mental road block” is due to the fact that a sourceless consciousness (God), lots of lucky breaks (chance), and an evolved panpsychist consciousness (also reliant initially on chance) are all beyond my credulity, and so I remain agnostic. This does not make my evolutionary hypothesis shakier than yours.
 
David's comment (Under “octopus”): Mother Nature is the best inventor, but who is the real inventor? If we have chance or design, who is the designer? If not God, who?-This is where we have to make distinctions: in my hypothesis concerning how evolution works, the real inventor of all these natural wonders is the intelligent organism itself (design). Then we have to ask what is the source of the intelligence of the inventive organism, chance or design? If not God, it's chance. And for reasons given above, I cannot give credence to either.