Clever Corvids: using tools (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, September 14, 2015, 19:38 (3358 days ago) @ dhw

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.-Dhw: 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. [...] You have insisted that bacteria have no intelligence and therefore must have been given instructions by God [...] 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. [...] 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 [...] 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?-DAVID: I don't know why you can't simply read my statement above and quit picking at it. I've said that life's processes are inventive. It may well be because each organism is given intelligent information to use for planning. That is obvious. I do think God helped pre-programmed or dabbled or both. I've said He guided evolution. And yes it is my contention that He planned on humans arriving. I've never changed my tune and won't.-“Oh do not pick,” the Lord God said.
“This fruit I will not share.”
But Adam picked, and very soon
The tree looked strangely bare.-I'll risk trying to explain once more why I pick. The essence of my hypothesis is that it is individual living things (not life as an 'emergent entity') that have intelligent, inventive minds (of whatever sort). Information is not intelligent; minds are intelligent, and minds use information for planning. My final question once more concerned bacteria, as they may hold the key to the beginnings of evolution, but if you believe God preprogrammed, dabbles with or personally guides them in their countless ways of solving problems, so be it. God's planning on humans arriving seems to me to be feasible if I take the theist line; for me the problem lies in the idea that this was his purpose from the very start, and he geared the vast higgledy-piggledy history of evolution to this one outcome. But perhaps we have reached a dead end, and I don't want you to be irritated by my picking. There are plenty of other tunes for us to hum (and haw)! -
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