More Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 06, 2024, 16:16 (23 days ago) @ dhw

Origin of humans

You have ignored my now ancient objection: why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God whose only purpose is to design H. sapiens, not do so directly? If he designed every adaptation individually, couldn’t that suggest experimentation, or new ideas, rather than the omniscience required for direct creation?

God chose to evolve us as a purpose, stepwise, for His own unknown reasons. Experimentation not necessary as He is omniscient.

Darwin’s survival theory

dhw: I’m happy with your acknowledgement that [your God] would have expanded the brain originally in order to improve chances of survival. It is therefore wrong to claim that the human brain cannot be explained by Darwin’s survival theory.

DAVID: Still disagree. The 315,000-year-old brain was much too adequate for those times.

dhw: You agree that your God’s original purpose was to improve chances of survival, and your God did not control subsequent complexifications. These resulted from new ideas, many of which were and are extensions of basic survival improvements through inventions, discoveries and institutions. All perfectly in keeping with Darwin’s theory of survival.

As a very limited view of it. Adler used the very opposite view.

Evolution, David and Adler

DAVID: God chose to evolve us, and you complain.

dhw: I complain about your wacky theories, and your constant effort to divert attention away from them by focusing on Adler’s evidence for God’s existence.

DAVID: Not a diversion but a strong point he made which counters your confused approach.

dhw: Proving God’s existence does not provide any support for your illogical theory of evolution, which you can’t explain. How does that make my approach “confused”?

You are confused about God's choice to evolve us for His own unknown reasons.

Introducing the brain: Defining sex differences

DAVID: We'll wait for a slew of trans brains to study.

dhw: It could make a big difference to negative social attitudes if scientists could explain these feelings as natural consequences of brain differences.

What is now true is obvious very male and quite feminine homosexuals, with exactly the same in lesbians: 'butch' and very feminine.

Evolution and purpose: teleonomy.

QUOTES:[the authors have explored] “in depth the different ways in which living systems have themselves shaped the course of evolution.”

As this collection compellingly shows, and as bacterial geneticist James Shapiro emphasizes, “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable.”

ID’s answer

QUOTE: The design of nature requires an explanation, an ultimate explanation. Rather than explain, invoking “teleonomy” just dodges the question. If we say that natural selection and random variation cannot explain something, evolutionary biologists can say, “Well, it’s not random variation, it’s goal-oriented.” If we ask where the goal-oriented-ness itself came from, they will say “natural selection.” The question returns to where it began; a final cause for the existence of design in nature has yet to be proposed.

DAVID: Good old Shapiro is back. Long ago we concluded natural selection is passive. Now suddenly with wishful thinking it is active again. As humans, who plan with purpose, we know a mind must be involved to plan the demonstrated intricacies of living biochemistry!

dhw: Yes, we have long since agreed that natural selection does not create anything, and nowhere is it mentioned in the description. It is the ID person who brings it in, and then erects a straw man entirely of his own making. The two quotes above could hardly be clearer: all the authors believe that organisms do their own designing, which is the exact opposite of random mutations. And of course they design with purpose! Every organism’s prime purpose is survival, and every evolutionary development either enables survival or improves the chances of survival.

The question your ID expert has every right to ask is how could this autonomous ability have originated? But that is evidently not the subject of the book, just as Darwin begins with Chapter 2 of life: the origin of species, not of life. There is no reason why any religious person or ID-er should think these findings exclude the possibility of God as the designer of the processes that enable organisms to pursue their own purpose in their own way, from “cognition and decision-making in plants to the niche-construction activities of many organisms to the self-making evolution of humankind.”

You've made a good review. ID accepts God. What you have avoided is the obvious purpose in evolution, the point of the book, which it tries to explain.