Humans, Dogs and oxytocin (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, September 25, 2015, 16:23 (3346 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Thank you for your very helpful answer. May I follow your example? You can't prove your belief that God guided evolution through divine preprogramming or divine dabbling or some other unknown form of guidance, and I view as enormous the odds against your proposal that God preprogrammed the weaverbird's nest from the beginning, or subsequently “dabbled”, as part of his plan to produce humans.-DAVID: OOPS! How do you give God odds? As you try to be a theist in your way of analysis, remember, it might be true that God can do anything He wants, as the religions suggest. Your claimed theistic hat is very askew.-I am not giving God odds. I am giving odds against your interpretation of your God's methods and intentions. Your approach is totally rational when dealing with the issue of design, but you have to jettison reason when you try to link your God's supposed purpose of producing humans to his special “guiding” or dabbling or 3.8-billion-year preprogramming of the weaverbird's nest and a billion other weird wonders and innovations. You are obviously aware of the irrationality of such a scenario, because that is the point at which you tell me to stop worrying about the details! But when I offer you an alternative view of your God's methods and intentions, all of a sudden reason returns and I am asked to provide details. So the bookies can decide the odds: the nest specially designed by God as part of his plan for humans versus the nest designed and engineered by the weaverbird using its own intelligence (perhaps God-given) for its own purposes.
 
dhw: But then neither can I prove my autonomous inventive intelligence hypothesis (not a conclusion, but a possibly theistic explanation of evolutionary innovation). And so if I cease to worry about details such as divine preprogramming and dabbling and anthropocentrism, will you cease to worry about details such as bacterial intelligence?-DAVID: But I am not worried. I know that bacteria follow intelligent information in their responses to stimuli.-Ah, a subtle change in the use of “worry”! So let me rephrase the deal. If I were to stop asking you to fill the gaps in your preprogramming, dabbling, guiding, anthropocentric view of evolution, would you stop asking me to fill the gaps in my view of evolution directed by cellular intelligence?