Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 12, 2017, 01:49 (2652 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: We agree that the complexity and coordination require intelligence. Why is it obvious that this must be in the form of a divine, undiscovered 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or the direct intervention of your God?

Because a rocky initial Earth has no provision to provide intelligence when life started

DAVID: And I respond that such an inventive mechanism cannot develop by chance. It must have been provided.

dhw:I have always allowed for the mechanism to be God-given. You now appear to have accepted that the mechanism is free to make its own changes, i.e. that it is autonomous, intelligent and inventive (though your God can dabble if wants to). Thank you. In return, I concede that we do not know the extent of its inventive capabilities. That is why my explanation of evolution’s history is a hypothesis.

Something or someone created the existing complexity. I still insist the planning has to be at the level of a brilliant mind.

dhw: There is nothing tentative about the free-for-all spectacle: your God creates a show of changing environments and life forms, the unpredictability of which is integral to the entertainment (think sport, literature, cinema). Maybe humans, the most unpredictable of all species, were dabbled. The point is that this scenario does not require us to tie ourselves in knots trying to explain why your God specifically designed different pre-whales, the monarch’s lifestyle, the weaverbird’s nest, and the parasite that gets pooped by the starling so that it can zombify the pill bug so that the pill bug gets eaten by the starling so that life can go on so that humans can evolve.

You may be tied in knots; I am not. God works by evolving things, the universe, plants and canimals. Evolution under God creates complexity in an ever increasing manner, and is set up to provide a balance in nature, supplying food for all.