Clever Corvids: using tools (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 11, 2015, 16:22 (3361 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The net result: The bacteria get a comfy mealybug home, and the bugs get the nutrition they need to live.”-dhw: Once more, huge thanks for sharing these wonders with us. 
If these organisms have not worked out their own symbiotic relationship, who or what did? Are you telling me that God preprogrammed the first living cells to ensure that the mealybugs and bacteria would eventually get together? Or he dabbled to make them do it?... You have finally conceded that these organisms may have an independent inventive intelligence of their own, but bacteria, which perform similar miracles of intricate design, have to have direct instructions from your God, because you cannot conceive of any intelligence without a brain. -DAVID: My position is that God created life. I don't think it arose by chance. The life we see through Natures Wonders shows highly complex arrangements. This means that 'life' as an emergent entity is highly inventive. Somehow through God's guidance. I can go no further, but you want it analyzed to the finest detail, which I cannot do, because God doesn't tell me how He does it.-But you have repeatedly told us how he does it and how he doesn't do it, and it is your “finest details” that I keep challenging. (For the sake of our discussions, I have accepted theistic evolution.) You have insisted that bacteria have no intelligence and therefore must have been given instructions by God, and until recently the same applied to weaverbirds, monarchs etc., though you have now granted them a degree of independent intelligence. You have said that the ways in which they were given these instructions were by preprogramming or dabbling. You also insist that God's plan from the very beginning was to produce humans, which means that evolution had to be geared to us. When did he tell you all this? Everyone who contributes to this website is looking for explanations, and we continually examine those on offer to see if they stand up to scrutiny. You have quite rightly probed what for me is a new evolutionary hypothesis arising from the work of Margulis & Co - namely, the intelligent, cooperative cell - and I have probed your own hypotheses, which I find to be increasingly far-fetched as well as ill-fitting in the context of the higgledy-piggledy comings and goings and the vast variety of evolutionary history. The case of the mealybug bacteria is just one of countless examples. If you don't think God would have preprogrammed these bacteria or dabbled with them, might that not suggest that like the weaverbird and the monarch and the wasp, they may be equipped with an independent intelligence of their own?