Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, February 20, 2017, 15:58 (2616 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It seems to me that a) if God created everything, he could hardly have created something that he was totally ignorant of,
David: I'm sure God knew of the problem issues. He gave us the big brain to deal with it.

According to you, he created the problem issues, and yet according to you he does not have a “smidgen of evil” in him. Also according to you, he doesn’t care what suffering his diseases and natural disasters cause. Let us for a moment forget the beauty of the world (for which due credit must of course be given), and tell me how you would describe a being who deliberately created the causes of appalling suffering but didn’t care?

dhw: The next exchange concerns “balance of nature”, and I will summarize the argument before quoting you: all forms of life need energy. According to you, God had to specially design all life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct in order to keep life going till he could dabble humans.
DAVID: Not just dabble. It is my bedrock position that God planned for humans. As you know, everything I propose is based on that starting point.

I thought you believed your God dabbled with pre-human brains. But it makes no difference whether he dabbled or included a human-brain programme in the millions of programmes you think he inserted into the first cells 3.8 billion years ago. Your bedrock position is still the same.

DAVID: God used a very long, a 3.8 billion year process to produce humans.

He used a very long, 3.8 billion year process to produce millions of species, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct, and the argument that he had to do so in order to produce humans makes no sense to you, but it is your bedrock position that this nonsensical scenario is true.

DAVID: Frog's tongues are just part of the amazing balance of nature.

An “amazing” process by which 99% of species die out because the balance of nature means nothing more than there being enough energy for some organisms to survive but not for others. Lucky old frogs – but that still doesn’t explain why their tongues had to be specifically designed so that humans could evolve.

DAVID: The process had to be taken from very complex bacterial cells, still here, to the very highly complex big-brained humans, who appeared in big jumps in complex forms and functions. Our research does not tell us how those giant speciation gaps were crossed but design is so obvious its consideration cannot be avoided, since the gaps require intense advanced planning. All you've come up with is maybe organisms could design their own advances, an ability not yet demonstrated.

Adaptation has been demonstrated over and over again, but neither my autonomous inventive mechanism, nor Darwin's innovative random mutations, nor your divine 3.8-billion-year computer programme for every innovation, nor your divine dabbling have yet been demonstrated. If the objection applies to one hypothesis, it applies to them all.

DAVID: If we keep unearthing increasing living complexity, but no intrinsic organismal design mechanism , only God is left to consider. That is the main thrust of my argument. Planning mind is required.

An “intrinsic organismal design mechanism” (previously known as an autonomous inventive mechanism) does not exclude God, since we are still left with the origin of the mechanism itself. You constantly shift the subject from what you yourself consider to be the non-sense of your 100% preprogramming/dabbling hypothesis to the existence of God.