dhw: It's not just Darwin who had no explanation. Nobody can explain it. -Agreed-> > dhw: Environmental change, innovative responses from the "intelligent genome", natural selection. Can anyone come up with a more convincing explanation?-No, except life is instilled with this inventiveness in a coded genome, and neither Darwin nor you can accept a prior intelligence put the whole show together. Did the coded complex genome put itself together by chance? I know your answer is not to accept chance, but a weird idea of intelligence building itself from scratch. And you have admitted to not believing that. What is left is logically a first cause intelligence. But you can't imagine a first cause eternal intelligence. So you are stuck on your picket fence, which I don't think is padded, because your lack of acceptable answers should make you very uncomfortable. But since you feel comfortable, there is no hope to change your mind.