An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, July 22, 2018, 14:45 (2105 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Think! No fence. If God guided every step in evolving humans, evolution occurred with common descent.

dhw: A few days ago I asked if you believed your God dabbled with existing life forms or created them from scratch. ...This seems to be confirmed by your statement above that you do not reject the separate creation theory – the exact opposite of common descent – and even think your God might have “stepped into the process continuously”. Or maybe only “at various points”. So you believe in common descent but you don’t reject the separate creation theory, which may have been continuous, and you are not sitting on the fence.

As explained before I view the term common descent in a specific way, which is obviously not your definition. Life started as single cells and in stages of increasing complexity reached humans with subsequent stages based on previous ones. God guided it continuously or intermittently. Your common descent differs how? Because you think it is all natural? My 'evolution' looks just like yours.

DAVID: And my question to you is where/how do intelligent cells find the new information to use for complex advances in evolving organisms. And if the information is already present (as in pre-programmed) how do they know how to omit some and rearranged other parts of it, all of which requires foresight as to what is required in the future living form. Lets use whales ass an example of the changes required.

dhw: According to one of your theories, your God provided the first living cells with programmes for every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life (apart from those he dabbled). How did subsequent organisms “know how to omit” the millions of irrelevant programmes? Do we now have your God continuously dabbling to switch off 99.999% of the programmes installed?

Same problem. I see the same evolution you do, but I have God guiding it.

dhw: In answer to your question, we know for a fact that some organisms are able to make changes to themselves in order to cope with changes in the environment. They do not anticipate – they react. I do not believe for one second that pre-whales looked into the future and prepared themselves for life in the water. I believe that all the changes would have taken place after they entered the water, and all the different stages represented improvements as they accustomed themselves to life in the water.

Here you are equating enormous species change in whale stages as simple adaptations! You are as usual reverting to Darwin.

dhw: Perhaps you would explain to us why your God prepared them in advance, and then kept on making changes until they reached their current form. Incompetence? Experimenting? The same question would apply to your theory that all he really wanted to produce was Homo sapiens, so why bother with all the other homos and hominins? Incompetence? Experimenting? And why bother with eight stages of whale if all he wanted was us?

My answer has always been balance of nature to provide eaten energy for life to continue the long process of evolution. I don't know the answer to the question why did God evolved life instead of direct creation of endpoints, but I know that complexities of life required a designer.

dhw: More generally, I have agreed over and over again that there is no proof that cell communities are capable of major innovations. It is a hypothesis, like the existence of a God who individually preprogrammed or dabbled every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life.

We all know there is no proof. Some of us want a reasonable explanation, not fence sitting.