Richard Dawkin's big blunder

[Esquilax]

The evidence that it is guided is the fact that evolution tends to a common result. It is guided by evolutionary stimuli. Evolutionary stimuli or fitness paradigm is the context in which evolution takes place. You yourself admitted that evolution is guided the same way a river is guided by its banks. I agree. As far as I can tell we really are not in disagreement.

Again, you have it backwards. Let me put it this way: I have a tennis ball, which I bounce on the ground once. I do it a second time, and just like the first, it bounces off of the floor and I can catch it. I can do that a hundred more times, just like the first. There's a common result there, but would you then say that the ball is only bouncing because it's being guided to bounce? Or would you just say that I'm introducing the ball to the same physical stimuli, and so it is reacting in a way that's consistent with the fact that literally nothing about what's happening to it has changed?

Convergent evolution is this, on a more complex scale; similar stimuli is being applied to essentially random mutations, so it's no more surprising that similar traits might arise than it is that a random number generator restricted to only single digit numbers will spit out the number six more than once.

You're saying "oh, similar things happened in evolution, so therefore guidance," when realistically the answer is "similar things happened in evolution because the stimuli was similar."

There is no random element in the chemical reaction you describe so of course the results will be identical. If the ancestors of the grey wolf and the marsupial wolf mutated identically then obviously you would expect the final forms to be identical. Evolution doesn't work like chemical reactions so your analogy fails.

My analogy works just fine, you just lack imagination. See, I accept that there's a random element present in evolution that isn't in chemical reactions, but that is also accounted for, since not every evolutionary model that comes out of nature is convergent; the grey wolf and the marsupial wolf (it's called a Tasmanian Tiger, by the way. I should know, I'm Tasmanian myself ) are the two examples that you have, but there's plenty of other animals who developed in the same environment without being the same.

Your claim is that the same stimuli, attached to the same random process, producing two creatures that are similar is impossible without guidance. I'm saying it's not terribly crazy to suggest that a random process, restricted by similar constraints, will occasionally repeat itself.

The difference is that I have evidence of nature, you have no evidence of guidance, particularly with "theistic implications," and that means you run afoul of Occam's Razor.

What is evident to me is that evolutionary systems whose origins are known all came into existence with the involvement of an intellect...somewhere in the process. That suggests that perhaps evolutionary systems cannot come into being without the involvement of an intellect.

Argument from ignorance.