Intelligence & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 16, 2013, 12:35 (4055 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Our discussion concerns the alternative hypotheses I have offered in my other post on this thread: 1) your concept of divine preprogramming of every innovation and every organ right from the first forms of life; 2) the alternative explanation that all this complexity has come about through cooperation between cells, whose intelligent mechanisms may even have been invented by your God. The concept of the intelligent cell dispenses with chance, and also allows for theistic evolution.-DAVID: I am struggling to change your concept slightly: The cells act intelligently because they automatically follow an information program from an intelligent source. That is theistic evolution. That is our only difference in description. 1) and 2) are two parts of the same concept.-No, they are not. First of all, as I keep repeating, the second hypothesis is meant only to explain the course of evolution, and it does not touch on the origin of the intelligence. Secondly, your hypothesis has God working everything out in advance, and although you claim not to be trying to read his mind, you have consistently said that his purpose was to produce human beings. Yours is an anthropocentrically teleological concept of evolution. The alternative that I am proposing is an ad hoc evolution, the theistic version of which would be that God created a mechanism that could adapt and invent in accordance with changing environmental conditions, i.e. God had no particular goal in mind, but just wanted to see what his mechanism would come up with (much more entertaining that way). Hence what I call the higgledy-piggledy course of evolution, with all its comings and goings. For this to happen, the cells could not be preprogrammed ... they would have to take their own decisions.