AB,
Genetic mutations are the driving force -…
There’s no such expression as “driving force” in the TofE. If you meant something like “a critical component but by no means the only one” then yes, you’d be right.
…without them there would be no natural selection.
That much at least is true because there’d be nothing on which natural selection could act. Just as, say, without an engine a car wouldn’t be a car. That's not to say though that a car isn't a lot more than just an engine.
The main point I have tried to make is that truly beneficial mutations will be extremely rare if all mutations are randomly generated.
Two problems there. First, once again “beneficial” is a judgment
after the event. As you actually mean something like, “better adapted to their environment” then say so.
Second, yes adaptations that better enable the genome to relate to its environment can be said to be rare in the sense that, say, they happen 1/1,000, 1/1,000,000 etc times a mutation occurs. They are precisely
not rare though when you take into account the billions of events and the huge amounts of time involved. Rarity depends on context – when you look at the number of opportunities for them to occur they could just as well be described as common.
To point it another way, your “point” still fails.
Yet the TOE seems to presume…
The TofE doesn’t “presume” anything other than its underlying axioms (as do all theories). Rather it relies on evidence, mathematical modelling and various other techniques to arrive at its conclusions. It’s an exceptionally well-supported theory – in some was better supported than the germ theory of disease and the theory of gravity – and your personal incredulity about it and misunderstanding of it doesn’t detract from that.
…that there will always be sufficient beneficial mutations to drive the natural selection process to build up highly complex organs using thousands of incremental steps, each of which has to have substantial survival benefit in its own right.
No it doesn’t say there will “always be” anything. What it
actually says is that all the available evidence tells us that complexity has always come from prior incremental steps.
You claim the end product is just pure chance, because the TOE has no underlying aims or goals apart from survival.
I don’t “claim” it – it’s just simple logic.
But can you not see divine purpose in the awesome attributes you have acquired?
No, because that would be irrational and potentially idiotic for several reasons that have been explained to you repeatedly and at length already but that you continue to ignore.
