An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 17, 2018, 11:56 (2110 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DHW: This thread is called “An Alternative to Evolution”, but at least 50% of your argument relates to design versus chance, and that is not an alternative because many people believe in a designed evolution. Nobody is asking you to speculate on who or what the designer is.

TONY:
Evolution=Random Chance
Design=Intentional, non-random
Literally any hypothesis against evolution will be design vs. chance. Of course at least 50% will design vs. chance.

Again and again you insist that evolution = random chance. It doesn’t! You resolutely refuse to recognize the fact that theistic evolutionists (including our resident panentheist David and the Catholic Church) and our resident agnostic (me) accept the possibility of DESIGNED evolution. Design is not an alternative to evolution, unless you think we are all idiots.

DHW: Your method is separate creation. If there is a designer, he can choose any method he likes, but there is no experimental evidence to prove that prototypes can spring forth out of nothing.

TONY: My method is a designed language for genetic programming. My personal beliefs have little to do with this hypothesis. My hypothesis does not specify special creation, dabbling, or divine evolution, only a genetic programming language.

Both David and I have already repeatedly accepted all your arguments for a designed language. Once more: that is not an alternative to evolution. Your alternative to evolution, as you have told us elsewhere, is special creation of prototypes. If you had called the thread “design versus chance”, we would not be having this disagreement. Please face up to the fact that evolution is not synonymous with chance.

dhw I have long since accepted the science without the religion. I am an agnostic largely because I recognize the scientific case for design but cannot accept the religion.

TONY: I am honestly amazed that you can maintain such unbalanced logic for so long, my friend. You deny random chance, recognize the science for design, recognize that with science we make inferences about things we can't see, yet can not fathom the same inferences made from scientific observations of design as to the nature of the Designer. Instead, you recognize design, at every level of existence that our science can observe, and choose to remain blind to the obvious inference that the designer is very, very real, and that much about Him […] can be learned and inferred through studying this amazing creation of His.

I have explained why I find it as difficult to believe in a designer God as I do to believe in chance. You have acknowledged this in as vivid and perceptive a manner as possible: “One way or the other, you have to believe the fantastic…And at the end it will be a matter of faith.” We are confronted by two “fantastic” explanations, but you cannot understand why someone might be unwilling to take the leap of faith you have taken in committing yourself to one of these fantastic explanations. As for "unbalanced logic", have you never heard the story of the logical ass who died because he couldn't choose between two identical bags of hay? In the eyes of theists and atheists alike, I am the logical ass, though I hope to stay alive a bit longer!

The rest of your post is, as always, admirably eloquent, and filled with sentiments that I can totally sympathize with, but it has nothing to do with an alternative to evolution.