Teleology & evolution: Vocal cord development (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, December 18, 2016, 13:30 (2691 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Firstly, you insist that your God dabbled or preprogrammed all the different vocal tracts and all the different phenotypic alterations that resulted in different species of hominin, although his purpose was to produce sapiens. Why do you think he did so, instead of going straight to sapiens if sapiens was his purpose?

DAVID: Answered many times before: God uses the evolutionary method for progress. Only religions use the Garden of Eden.

And yet (4 December at 17.33 under "automatic molecular actions") you can’t actually explain why he didn’t start at the Garden of Eden. You simply assume that you know his purpose, and so it doesn’t matter if the method doesn’t make sense to you. Whereas if your God intended organisms to find their own ways of survival and improvement, that would explain why different species of hominin came and went, and 99% of other species also came and went, in the great higgledy-piggledy of evolution. At a stroke it would rid you of all those aspects of evolutionary history you find so puzzling.

dhw: You believe the ability to make new sounds led to thought, whereas I propose that thought led to the ability to make new sounds. Speech before thought, or thought before speech? I know which one I consider more logical.

DAVID: Many thoughtful folks I read point out that we think in words which is what expands our ability to conceptualize and develop abstract thought. Speech before deep thought.

Of course we think in words that have already been invented, but how do you imagine words get invented in the first place? Do you believe your God says to somebody “computer” and then somebody invents a computer? Every word in the great collective store of every language must have had its origin in an object or idea that needed a NEW “sound” (word) to express it. The object or thought precedes the invention of the word that describes it. Then, and only then, do we the inheritors use the words in our thoughts.