Bacterial motors carefully studied (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 05, 2016, 19:10 (3153 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: You believe your God gave humans the intelligence to make their own decisions. So why could he not have done the same with other organisms? (Some scientists tell us they do have such intelligence, but you prefer to dismiss their findings.)
DAVID: You forget human intelligence is so different from animal intelligence. We can reason and plan. Can animals to any important degree? No.-That is the whole issue! Where do you draw the line between a degree and an important degree? We design a thousand different types of home; the weaverbird designs one.
 
dhw: Even humans have to combine conceptualization with trial and error when they create something new. Nobody knows to what extent other organisms have originally achieved their wonders in the same way.
DAVID: Yes, we do not know the extent of animal advanced planning. It doesn't seem to be much.-It doesn't seem to be much compared to our scale of advanced planning. But it seems to be enough for their purposes. -dhw: Perhaps because instead of starting out with the purpose of creating humans, he started out with the purpose of seeing what would happen if he set evolution in motion. You don't like to speculate on why he would have created humans, but whatever the reason, it can be applied to the rest of “creation”. Possibly as an entertainment to relieve his eternal boredom.
DAVID: Again interpreting God's mind, while I shouldn't. -You asked me why God would only intervene on and off. You can hardly complain if I give you a possible answer.-DAVID: I feel He wanted to create a thinking being to respond to Him, which we have done. We think like He does, only to a much less degree. Remember we are made in His image, at the mental level.-I don't have a problem with that, except that I'm not sure what you mean by “respond to him”. Response usually entails the other party making the first move, whereas you have always claimed that God deliberately hides himself from us. You have often accused me of anthropomorphizing God when I talk of boredom and entertainment, so I'm glad you now accept that if we think like him, he must think like us. I wrote that whatever reason he had for creating us could be applied to the rest of creation. Well, how much more entertaining to watch a thinking, questioning, ever expanding intelligence, rather than the endless comings and goings of organisms only bent on their own physical survival/improvement. But your anthropocentric hypothesis still leaves us with the problem of 3.(whatever) billion years of dabbled or (for you too, unbelievably) preprogrammed innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders all somehow geared to the production of us!