Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 14, 2016, 13:21 (3019 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Maybe - if he exists - God did dabble to give us our special brain. But I am proposing that no dabbling or preprogramming was necessary for every single form of life and lifestyle if we recognize that cell communities have their own (possibly God-given) inventive intelligence.
DAVID: You can't have it both ways. Since you accept the possibility that God might have given cell communities inventive intelligence, that must mean He gave them instructions on how to plan for improvements. That is really quite close to my thinking.-Absolutely not. Once again, this boils down to your reluctance to acknowledge the possibility that organisms other than humans can think for themselves. You are a firm believer in human free will: since you also believe in God, presumably you believe that God gave humans the means to make their own decisions. That is the scenario I am proposing for all organisms: that they do their own thinking - not on anything like the scale of us humans, but within the parameters of their own particular nature. Not under instruction, but using their own autonomous intelligence (possibly God-given). I'm afraid this is nowhere near to your thinking.
 
DAVID: We've discussed on-board inventive mechanisms before. We've agreed that such could exist. I've admitted I don't know how natures wonders came about, but they offer several different interpretations of God's role in them, and no one will ever know exactly what is correct.-Agreed. All we can do is look at the history and come up with hypotheses that might explain it. Your own hypothesis entails a dislocation between your anthropocentrism and God's personal planning of all the wonders. Mine offers an all-embracing explanation with room both for your God and even for special attention to humans.
 
dhw: It appears that you would rather jettison logic than acknowledge the mere possibility that cell communities (organisms) have the intelligence (possibly God-given) to conduct their own affairs.
DAVID: Not so, as you see above, but not interpreted the way you do, which is an attempt to recognize the possibility of God, but diminish his role, which fits your discomfort about accepting an all powerful Being.-There is no diminution of his role - if he exists - since it just as feasible for an all-powerful God to entertain himself with an unpredictable spectacle as it is for him to create a predictable array of clockwork robots. Besides, I seem to remember you occasionally granting the possibility that God is neither all-powerful nor all-knowing, and that he may be capable of learning from experience, or “becoming”, as in process theology.