Theistic evolution vs. Darwinism (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, May 25, 2013, 11:45 (3961 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: When you arrive in the afterlife, you will be surprised to find even atheists there.-If my panpsychist hypothesis is true, there will be atheists but no god!
 
DAVID: I don't find the questions in my belief system that you dredge up to thwart yourself.-What is the source of your first cause energy's intelligence? Don't know. How is your super-intelligence able to dabble? "I have no idea, just as I have no idea how He arranged the start of life." (Innovation, 13 May at 15.28)-DAVID: I have no idea how your leap works. We know how intelligence works because we have it. We experience consciousness.-We do experience it, but we don't know how it works or where it comes from. That applies to your God hypothesis as it does to my panpsychist hypothesis.-DAVID: Your raw energy, by no plan makes matter, which is somehow organized enough to invent intelligence.
 
Once more: matter does not INVENT intelligence. Energy makes matter. Matter changes. The energy within the matter BECOMES aware of the changes. Here are three pointers for you: 1) You believe in intelligent energy (God), so the concept is not alien to you. 2) You believe in an afterlife in which your own intelligence will survive the death of your materials. That is individualized intelligent energy, which has evolved through a lifetime's experiences. 3) We know there are different forms of intelligence with different forms of communication (e.g. bacteria, plants, animals). This is a concept I'm extending to all evolution, including the universe: individualized intelligence as energy which evolves through experience (unlike your God, who has always had it) and is able to control matter from within (unlike your God, who somehow tweaks it from without).-DAVID: I have to start with some type of organization.
 
Why do you "have" to start with organization? Why not start with disorder, and a gradual establishment of order (rules) through the experience and experiments of evolving intelligences? -DAVID: My beliefs allow for psychic experiences. I believe in human species consciousness, per Sheldrake. your contortions are unnecessary.-No contortions. Once you accept the basic premise that intelligence is energy, it follows on that it doesn't depend on the materials in which it's embedded, and may therefore not only survive them but may also communicate with other intelligences.
 
DAVID: I still hold to the position that your theory is simply a contorted version of mine. The only difference I see is your method of creation of intelligence and consciousness. I start with it at the beginning and you create it as things go along. We all get to the same end result. But to avoid God you sure get convoluted.-All theories have to lead to existence as we know it. The difference therefore has to be how we reach that point. Your theory entails a form of existence none of us know anything about ... a single "quantum mind" which is hidden behind a wall of quantum uncertainty, but dabbles in mysterious ways to fulfil a purpose which is also hidden. The panpsychist hypothesis entails no such contortions. All it requires is matter (which we know exists), energy (which we know exists), and the single step by which energy within matter acquires awareness (which we know exists, though we don't know how it works.) If I believed in this, I would undoubtedly comment that to bring in God, you sure get convoluted.


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