Bacterial motors carefully studied (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 03, 2016, 13:32 (3156 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The real reason I edited your post is that you keep reverting to the 3.8 billion year programming as though I believe this thought. I don't. In the past, repeatedly, I have stated that I believe God guided evolution but I have no idea how He did it. Programming and dabbling were two alternatives I stated as possibilities, and I accepted your inventive on-board mechanism might be the way, but you would never accept my proviso that God would monitor it so that evolution progressed as He wished…-You are assuming he did not wish it to progress unmonitored! I am surprised but pleased to hear that you don't believe in your hypothesis of a 3.8-billion-year computer programme after all. But since you insist on God's “guidance”, even down to the building of the weaverbird's nest, this leaves you with nothing but divine dabbling (unless you can think of an alternative means of “guidance”) to account for every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder. For more on this, see my second post.-dhw: The discussion concerns how evolution works. This has absolutely nothing to do with agnosticism…
DAVID: Of course your agnosticism is in play. Note your IM remains independent of God's guidance, which, believing in God, I insist must be part of an IM.-Once more: your insistence that God guided every evolutionary development is your own theistic version; my theistic alternative of God inventing an autonomous mechanism has nothing to do with agnosticism, and everything to do with the history of evolution and different interpretations of God's intentions and methods. -dhw: You surely won't deny your God's ability to invent such a mechanism […]
DAVID: Of course, God could invent and grant such a mechanism to organisms, but with guidance.-Why could he not have invented a mechanism to function without his guidance? -dhw: However, the hypothesis is anathema to you because it goes against your theory that God's evolutionary purpose was to produce or feed humans, although you freely admit that you don't know how the purpose and the history fit together.-DAVID: The history does fit! We are here with our giant brains, that are not needed for survival, as proven by other primates who are here also over 7-10 million years. -As agreed a thousand times, the survival of bacteria shows that no further developments were “needed for survival”. It is the special creation of the weaverbird's nest (plus a few million other examples) that doesn't fit your anthropocentric theory. But I am not hell-bent on denying a special place for humans, or even the possibility of a (comparatively) late divine dabble. My objection is to your insistence that all innovations etc. are “guided” by God, and are/were geared to humans right from the start. Maybe the weaverbird designed its own nest for its own purposes. (See my second post.)-DAVID: When you think about God you read Him from your agnostic point of view, nothing like my point of view. Are humans an accident as Gould claims, arriving by Darwin's theory? They look like a saltation to me. God did it. Simple logic.-Lots of theists read God (the gods) differently from your point of view. Indeed, you yourself reject many views of the organized religions. When I think about him, I try to envisage him in the light of the world he created, and I do not think your panentheism gives you more authority than my agnosticism to speculate on his motives, nature and methods. My hypothesis actually allows for humans not being an accident, for their being a saltation (like every other innovation), for a God, and even for a God intervening. What it does not allow for is every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder depending on God's guidance, and for his anthropocentric starting-point.