Re: To sum up

On 18/02/2025 09:37, MarkE wrote:

On 18/02/2025 8:15 pm, Martin Harran wrote:

The question I would like to see you address is how your Intelligent
Designer might have gone about this.
>
The human brain indeed has unique characteristics in terms of its
ability and functions. Other species do not have those
characteristics, but they do have similar brain structures and, as
Ernest has pointed out in several examples, those brains can sometimes
be argued to be even more complex than the human one. So how do you
think your Intelligent Designer went about this? Did he play around
with various prototype brain designs on other species and then come up
with a particular design that he decided to give to humans alone?

 Why the hostile, mocking tone, and straw man depiction of God?
 

First, if your position is that the Designer of the Intelligent Design movement is not defined to be God, you can't legitimately describe a speculation on the nature of the Designer to be a straw man depiction of God; you just said that the Designer may not be God. In fact Martin's suggestion is pretty much what I infer to be the implications of your claim.
Ray Martinez's position was absolutely no evolution, not even microevolution, but he also defined evolution as entailing atheism. In common with creationists in general he wasn't clear about what he thought happened in the past to achieve the present state. However both Burkhard and myself suspected him of being an omphalic evolutionist - evolution occurs but God does it. (Omphalic evolutionism is the domain specific version of occasionalism, are as I sometimes call it Islamo-Calvinist determinism.) I had previously thought, based on your focus on incredulity about abiogenesis that you had tacitly accepted evolution, but your recent posts have falsified that hypothesis. They leave you looking as if you have a position not dissimilar to that inferred for Ray.
What do you think stops evolution from the equivalent of a chimpanzee brain to the equivalent of a human brain, or from the equivalent of a monkey brain to the equivalent of a chimpanzee brain, or from the equivalent of a lemur brain to the equivalent of a monkey brain, or from the equivalent of a tree shrew brain to the equivalent of a lemur brain, and so on along the trajectory of increased encephalisation and brain complexity? What particular step do you find incredible? Since I don't see any difference between the various steps the natural assumption is that you find all the steps incredible, which leaves me (and presumably Martin) to infer that you hold a position something like what Martin outlined.
Only if you assume that the Designer is God, and an omniscient God at that, could you describe Martin's comment as mocking God. But remember that the Intelligent Design movement tells us that it does not tell us the identity or properties of the Designer, so you would be condemning Martin for taking the Intelligent Design movement at its word.
--
alias Ernest Major