The Mind of God (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 20:49 (3572 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ...if the amazing complexities of our brain can make us autonomous, perhaps the amazing complexities of other organisms can do the same.
DAVID: As usual you blithely slip over the huge gap in human complexity from all the others. Of course, multicellular organisms have their own levels of autonomy.-The gap, which I acknowledge, is irrelevant to the issue of autonomy. Since you now agree that multicellular organisms have their own levels of autonomy, the only slight disagreement between us is over single-celled organisms, which many respected scientists claim also have their own levels of autonomy.-DAVID: I've agreed that God may well have made life very inventive. we are still unearthing the extent of epigenetic mechanisms. For some of us even the life style of the d-b-p suggests design. I've actually seen some in action in Australia.-Life is not inventive. Organisms (and/or your God) are inventive, and an autonomous inventive mechanism designs. Back to the three (possibly four) hypotheses: God preprogrammed the d-b-p, God created the d-b-p separately, the antecedents of the d-b-p used their inventive mechanism to change themselves into d-b-p's, or God gave them half a set of instructions and left the other half to them (= your semi-autonomy). Take your pick.-dhw: You have imposed a very specific purpose, and on analysis it seems very hard to fit that purpose to the higgledy-piggledy course of evolution as we know it. Of course you can escape by saying nobody knows the mind of God, but I see nothing wrong in our looking for other possible purposes that fit in more snugly than the one you advocate.
DAVID: Your 'hard to fit' problem stems from an unwillingness to accept how vast the gap is between humans and everything else. Please give me one 'other possible purpose' that fits the record without interpreting the intentions of God. Since I accept Him That is my approach, not yours.-I accept the gap, but not your insistence that the gap did not evolve naturally. Your anthropocentric purpose is an interpretation of God's intentions. Maybe his intention was to produce a higgledy-piggledy bush that followed its own course, or to produce some sort of image of himself (but he didn't know how to do it, whereas you think he did), or to play games with different life forms. All of these could explain the higgledy-piggledy bush. All forms of life pursue the purpose of survival and propagation, which even for many humans is an end in itself, so maybe God created life for its own sake. If you ask me why, I'll ask you why he created humans, but you don‘t like that sort of question.