Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 19, 2017, 13:19 (2653 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is my belief, based in part on milk production, live birth and brain power, that mammals are much more complex than the animals you have listed.
dhw: I agree. Thank you. It is therefore absurd to argue that “evolution advances to the most complex survivors” when evolution has clearly led to survivors at all levels of complexity, and in your version God has deliberately guided it all the way to the weaverbird’s nest, the parasitic wasp and barnacle, the camouflaged cuttlefish etc. as well as to mammals.
DAVID: We are arguing a side issue. Of course there branches of the bush that are less complex than the latter more complex arrivals. But overall life forms proceeded from simple to more complex. That is the history of evolution.

It was you who created the side issue with your statement that “evolution advances to the most complex survivors” – which was perhaps a roundabout attempt to tell us that evolution advances to your God’s purpose, which is humans. That life forms proceeded from simple to more complex is a very different statement which no evolutionist can possibly deny.

dhw: My hypothesis allows for your God to have invented evolution and to have invented the DNA code and to fiddle with it.
DAVID: A statement I can completely accept.
dhw: I hope you will also accept that your rejection of my hypothesis on the grounds that the autonomous inventive mechanism has not been found reeks of double standards, since your own version of the mechanism (the undiscovered computer programme plus the unobserved divine dabbling – both of which are unknown to scientific research) has not been found either.
DAVID: Not finding God's program is not equal to the debate over the necessity for a mind doing all the planning. A mind is required, not might be, as in your so-called theistic positions.

Once again you are switching from the way evolution works to the source of the mechanism. These are two different discussions. You reject the possibility that your God might have created an autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism to drive evolution. And you reject it because the mechanism hasn’t been found. Nor has the divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme you prefer to my mechanism, and no one has observed God dabbling. Double standards.

QUOTE (from "Fine-Tuning": ...a benevolent God would want to create the physical laws so that life-conducive universes would be overwhelmingly likely.
(David’s comment: A poor argument from religious belief. He may not be benevolent, and He may continuously guide the process until He has his desired result. His argument sounds like Deism: God started the process and then let it continue on its own.)
dhw: I like your agnosticism concerning the nature of God. Why is it more likely that your nobody-knows-what-he's like God guided the process than that he let it continue on its own?
DAVID: As I've explained, because of the requirement for intense mental planning, which only God can do.

Why can’t your God have intensely planned life and then let it continue on its own? Isn’t that precisely what you imagine he has done with humans and their free will?