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[jimwalton]

The problem with your evolution argument is the evolution has never proved that it can explain ANY of what you claim. It has never proved that (or how) personality can arise from the impersonal, how meaning can arise from matter + time +chance, how purpose can come from random sequences, or how mental faculties or consciousness can come from chemistry, physics, and astronomy. Evolution has failed to explain ANY of that, let alone have done a good job of it. Your only claim to fame is, "Well, it must have happened, because here we are," and if that's what you've got, you're pretty empty-handed.

The Primary Axiom of evolutionary theory states that man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection. Suppose we have a little red wagon. Let's assume the first genome encoded the assembly instructions for the first wagon. Each newly copied manual was used to make a new little red wagon. The scribe (random process), being imperfect, makes errors each time (mutations) so the next wagon comes out different, with its own new set of instructions. the first wagon and its instructions are junked. Errors accumulate with each new generation. They don't even come from the first one, but only from the previous mutated one. The resulting wagons start to change. No doubt you realize we are looking at a deteriorating picture. Information is being lost, instructions are being downgraded, and wagons will get worse. Eventually the system will break down, and workable wagons will become extinct.

But let's bring a hero onto the scene: Natural selection. Natural selection is like a judge, "deciding" which wagons are suitable for further copying. But it cannot judge between previous wagons and current wagons, but only current wagons (there is never direct selection for good instructions, but only for good wagons. Mutations are complex, but selection can only be carried out on the level of the whole organism). The scribe and the judge work entirely independently. The scribe is essentially blind, working only at the level of molecules (he can see only the letters he is copying, not the whole organism). Random mutations consistently destroy information. The judge, on the other hand, has his hands tied, because he can only choose from what is on the table now. And remember, there is NO INTELLIGENCE INVOLVED IN THIS SCENARIO. The "scribe" is an array of senseless molecular machines that blindly replicate (inaccurately) DNA, and the "judge" is just the tendency for some pieces to reproduce more than others. Natural selection is not intelligent, but blind, mechanistic, and purposeless. Neither have intelligence, purpose, or reason.

And from this process, you claim, evolution does a good job of explaining reason, truth, personality, and purpose. I think you've been deceived, my friend. While there is a remote possibility of such mutations scoring an actual benefit, naturalistic evolution is a theory that proposes that we won the lottery 100 million times in a row.

Of course evolution as a process has been proved. But what hasn't been proved (and can't be) is that evolution did not have an intelligent cause behind it. Ah, theism. Even your claim about the iPod: "If we write a machine learning algorithm, like a neural network, and feed it data, it can develop skills and "reasoning" from the data, despite being a completely deterministic and mechanical system" requires intelligent design for the system to work.