TONY: Possibility 1) [WITHOUT A PLAN] Contradict the very fact that even though things so random and unrelated they are in fact connected in such a myriad of ways that we humans with all of our technology, intellect, reasoning, creativity, and several thousand years worth of effort have yet to discover even a minuscule fraction of their interconnectedness.
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> I'm sorry, but this part of your post and your house analogy are the result of a misunderstanding. This thread is about whether God built a programme into the first molecule to make evolution culminate in humans. That and that alone is the plan I'm referring to. I have already several times acknowledged the interconnectedness of things, and if God created life, then of course he could not have done so without planning. -> That is precisely the point that I'm making. If God's intention right from the start was to create humans, why bother with dinosaurs? Your argument so far has been that maybe dinosaurs were essential to the creation of humans. My argument is that if you follow my two scenarios, you don't have to look for such connections. In scenario 1) life is an end in itself, but God eventually gets the great idea of creating something that reflects himself more closely (humans). In scenario 2) he had already had the great idea, but didn't know quite how to go about it and therefore had to keep experimenting. (I should add that I rather like the idea of God learning as he goes along, as it would make life less boring for him!) -You do not build a house without preparing the foundation unless you want it to fall down around your ears. And if you are busy 'experimenting' with your foundation, the final house will fall down around your ears. This is the point I am trying to make, and it directly addresses the flaws in both scenarios(as I perceive them)1) Life IS an end in and of itself, but it was not a purposeless or meaningless experiment. 2) Humanity was not an afterthought, but a part of the design plan from the beginning(though not necessarily imprinted on the first molecule). If you, for example, took a close look at the biblical account (being one of the better known creation stories), humanity was created independent and AFTER all other life. So, your scenario 1, coupled with what I have been trying to say about prior life being preparatory to humanity, the various stages described and their apparent analog to the Cambrian explosion, and the fact that we can not find a genetic match closer than 60% or so to Human's all lends a bit more credence to at least some of that accounting being accurate. (At the very least more accurate than the evolved from amoebas and Chimps scenario) -> 
> Both scenarios end up with man, but I have no idea whether God is going to leave it at that. If he exists, I could well imagine him waiting till David's prophecy comes true (doomsday) and then starting on something else. He seemed happy enough watching dinosaurs for 160 million years, so we ain't seen nothin' yet. But that's not the point. I'm arguing against the theory that God put a programme for humans into the first molecule, which I find far less likely than God intervening and experimenting. In this context, you still haven't answered one question which I put to you directly: How do my two "divine" scenarios ... both of which explain irrelevances and extinctions and also eliminate dependence on random changes in the environment ... contradict the evolutionary facts as we know them?-We do not have evolutionary facts, we have evolutionary theories with more holes than OJ Simpson's alibi. Personally, I do not think that your ideas contradict evolutionary theory, other than evolutionist would say that we come from chimps. Which I couldn't disagree with more vehemently.-
I think ultimately you and I are disagreeing on a very very specific point that to me is trivial. The phrases 'preprogrammed in the molecule' and 'part of the plan before the first molecule was created'. One implies the instructions were hardwired, the other that there was some active creation happening. My personal view is active creation, though I can see the appeal and possibility of hardwired instructions. In a sense, I kind of think that BOTH are correct, and not mutually exclusive based on my belief about everything being connected.

David and dhw squabbling over which of these scenarios is most in line with the demands of our mutual friend William of Ockham. May I just ask you why you are so resolutely opposed to the idea of God not having got it all figured out from the very start?-Like a mathematician, I prefer the elegance of my scenario. Set up the genome to develop complexity, and let life forms develop in every direction, with the ability to adapt to changing ernvironment. Remember the Earth was still is very formative stages when first life began. No afterthought fiddlings. The other evolution, that of our universe, was quite straight forward, and follows the underlying laws very nicely. Sir William also asked for the simplest explanation, as I was taught, for the factors at hand. I guess some of my response is based on my own faith in the UI I have created in my mind. My UI is not a ditherer.-Your scenarios are not wrong. They fit, in their own way. They are too contrived for my taste. But then, I must remember, you need your picket fence, and the reminder that there are so many unsettled points to consider.

For the sake of argument, however, I've accepted the UI scenario, but cannot see the logic in the view that evolution with its vast number of branches was geared right from the start to the automatic creation of humans. I have offered two alternative views: 1) God created life without a plan but through experimentation got to humans. 2) God did have a plan ... to create a reflection of himself ... but needed to keep experimenting in order to get closer and closer to what he was looking for. Both scenarios dispense with the need to find a purpose for the dodo, and the need to explain why God should have chosen such a roundabout route to humanity. Of course you can argue, as David does, that we don't understand God's logic, but with my two scenarios there is no such mystery. This brings me to the question which was central to my previous post but which you have ignored, and so I will ask it again: How do these two possibilities, both of which explain irrelevances and extinctions and also eliminate dependence on random changes in the environment, contradict the facts as we know them?
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Possibility 1) Contradict the very fact that even though things so random and unrelated they are in fact connected in such a myriad of ways that we humans with all of our technology, intellect, reasoning, creativity, and several thousand years worth of effort have yet to discover even a minuscule fraction of their interconnectedness. Every single species, be it plant or animal, and every single element and molecule functions in beautiful harmony. Does that sound like the work of a shoddy experimenter? Even the ancient creatures, dinosaurs, mastodons, bacteria, plants, all lived in a strange sort of symbiotic harmony together. Just to make sure that is perfectly clear. The VERY FIRST species of life on this planet, and every species that has EVER existed has lived in symbiotic harmony with each other. The only thing even remotely challenging that statement that I am aware of is Humanity itself, who by virtue of our lofty reasoning abilities manage to throw things completely out of balance. And I think that is an important feature in and of itself. Only the work of an intelligent creature has been able to de-harmonize the work of another intelligence. No major cataclysm ever managed to provide more than a momentary bump in this design. No virus, no meteor, earthquake, or volcano, not even the splitting of Pangaea. None of this strikes me as the work of a sloppy, inexperienced workman.-
The second scenario doesn't make sense in at least one fashion. Creating a Dinosaur, or a plant, or a platypus, is not even remotely close to creating something akin to human. In fact, there is no other creature in existence on this planet that comes even remotely close to what makes us human. Our reasoning, intellect, emotion, ascetic appreciation, imagination, self-awareness, creativity, and other fundamentally human traits. The closest they can come up with is a chimp or a gorilla which is indeed a poor approximation, no matter how much sign language they can teach it.-I hope that addresses the questions. I have not been intentionally ignoring them, but felt that directly answering them was rather unnecessary if I was able to make the point of harmonic symbiosis of all life clear.


> For the sake of argument, however, I've accepted the UI scenario, but cannot see the logic in the view that evolution with its vast number of branches was geared right from the start to the automatic creation of humans.-You keep missing the point that results in accepting the above scenario: the stresses of the environment, climate change, nature, natural enemies, do not require the development of big-brained humans. We are so highly developed, we are now tending to threaten the balance of nature on the planet. In fact we can blow the blue dot up!!! Then why are we here?? We are certainly more developed than we need be over the 6 million years of our development, and over the last 2,000 years we are becoming downright dangerous to the health of this planet! The doomsday clock is there for a logical reason! But we are here without any reason suggested by Darwin's logic.- 
> I have offered two alternative views: 1) God created life without a plan but through experimentation got to humans. 2) God did have a plan ... to create a reflection of himself ... but needed to keep experimenting in order to get closer and closer to what he was looking for. Both scenarios dispense with the need to find a purpose for the dodo, and the need to explain why God should have chosen such a roundabout route to humanity. Of course you can argue, as David does, that we don't understand God's logic, but with my two scenarios there is no such mystery. This brings me to the question which was central to my previous post but which you have ignored, and so I will ask it again: How do these two possibilities, both of which explain irrelevances and extinctions and also eliminate dependence on random changes in the environment, contradict the facts as we know them?-Your scenarios fit the evolutionary processes we see but ignore my comments above. All of the reasoning has to fit under Ockham's umbrella. Your's doesn't. Why the big brain, unless it was predestined?

Tony (B_M), presumably in support of David's anthropocentric interpretation of evolution, has again rightly pointed out that humans depend on all other life, which depends on the earth, which depends on the galaxy, which depends on the universe etc. This applied to the dodo just as much as to you and me, and certainly does not mean that humans were the final goal. If you can explain why dodos were a necessary part of God's plan to create humans, I might be able to understand why a specific, perfectly planned project takes precedence over 1) an improvised experiment with no ultimate goal, or 2) a targeted experiment without prior knowledge of how to achieve the goal. 
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> As for a baker planning to make a loaf and waiting 45 minutes for the dough to rise, it's a nice analogy, but it doesn't explain why someone who wants to bake a loaf should produce a dozen jam tarts as well, and then throw them away. (My analogy relates to the dodo, not to the obviously essential microbes or plants.)-The baker analogy is more fitting. Does the baker have to plan precisely how much sugar the yeast will consume, or how much they will ferment, or how much gas they will release? No. He simply knows that in 45 min, the yeast will feed on the sugars in the dough and make the bread rise before it is ready to put in the oven. -As for the Dodo, what ate the dodo? What ate the dodo's remains, or droppings, or eggs? What mites festered beneath the dodo's feathers? What did the Dodo eat? Was it something that no other animal at the time ate? Did the Dodo have or develop any unique immunities that it passed on to the creatures that ate it? What about and unique genetic mutations that were passed on to the creatures who ate it? Unless you know absolutely every detail about the Dodo, you can not say that the Dodo was irrelevant to the process of preparing the earth or sustaining the growing life on it.


> Based on extremeophiles, life was created to be tenacious, pop up everywhere, to be sure evolution of life survived to create us. -A tough extremophile bacteria has been found in Mono Lake, living with high concentrations of arsenic. Once started, living matter is extremely tough, and ery adaptable.:-http://www.the-scientist.com/news/display/57851/-A more theologic discussion of the arsenic bug and what it means in a duscussion of purpose in evolution;-http://procrustes.blogtownhall.com/2010/12/02/alien_life.thtml

What I find separating David and the atheists is basically what uve already mentioned that did the species evolve first through a creator or they are here just by chance.
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> I am probably gonna end up dying without knowing the definitive answer to all of this. I said probably like the true agnostic that I am.(LOL)-Both of your comments have 'time' as part of the equation.Chance for progress in complexity is working against known 'time' intervals. So probabilities are part of the issue. Matt wants concrete math with knowledge of everything in the universe to calculate odds. I say it is obvious that 540 million years from the Cambrian Explosion is not enough time for chance mutation to create the current human brain. The other odds are how to put together a life form from inorganic matter. That only took 250 million years!!!


> I find your argument against "dumb luck" totally convincing, here as in your book, and as I keep trying to emphasize, it is one reason why I cannot accept the atheist argument that attributes life, consciousness etc. to chance. In my last post I have tried to make that clear, and have also tried to make it clear that I can't believe in a UI that either came about by chance or has always been around. That is why I'm an agnostic. I can only repeat that my objection to your scenario is that you focus the UI's original mechanism precisely on the deliberate and automatic production of humans, while at the same time it produces by chance a vast array of species that have nothing to do with the production of humans. This does not seem to me a logical piece of planning.-No one has said that the UI is logical at our level of thought. 
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> In your automatic scenario, why would the original mechanism have changed from chimpobo to hominid, since the chimpobos were doing OK (and are still around to prove it, although the bonobo is in trouble now)?-Because the automatic scheme branched off a line, australopithicus, to grow big brains. It was pr-planned to happen
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> My two scenarios allow for all the other branches and extinctions and irrelevancies between first molecule and first homo sapiens, and do not rely on random changes to the environment. Please tell me how they contradict the evolutionary facts as we know them.-You have the UI dabbling and dithering too much IMHO. There should be (I don't know this) some degree of preciseness if one can easily create a universe as starters
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> In your response to BBella, you ask: "What can 'outside interference' do to living primates to make their brains grow?" If there is such a thing as a UI that created the original physical mechanism, it could also interfere (experiment) with it as above, just as our puny human scientists interfere (experiment) even now with existing mechanisms. -The UI doesn't have to. The mechanisms are built in and there are self-correcting safeguards against tampering, the complex feed back loops of epigenetics.

well all i know is there isnt really a definitive answer as to whether it is IE or NS. But david what i wanna know is how are you so positive that it has to be IE 
> (Intelligent Design)-The answer is so long I wrote a book, but the following entry here is a brief summary, under the title 'A challenge to David' from Matt.-Monday, November 15, 2010, 16:02 . Look up this entry. I've done 30cyears of study on these subjects, read 150 books and am still reading.