Bacterial motors carefully studied: Addendum (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, April 16, 2016, 09:09 (3143 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: I don't know why it should be deemed unnatural, or “no good reason”, for some intelligent organisms to exploit nature's opportunities in order to improve themselves… 
DAVID: They can, but only if God gives them planning ability.
dhw: I would subsume planning ability under the heading of an autonomous inventive mechanism, but apparently your God's powers are too limited for him to provide organisms with that. However, thank you for now accepting that evolution might advance through a natural drive for improvement. Another problem solved.-DAVID: That is a stretch of my comments. There is obviously some sort of 'drive to complexity', for that is what we see. I would dispute that it is 'natural', but instead state that it is guided.-For those who believe in common descent, the drive to complexity - or to improvement - is limited to those individual organisms in which the innovations take place. The rest remain the same (or go extinct). In my hypothesis the innovators use their (God-given?) intelligence to exploit opportunities offered by the environment. An analogy would be individual humans using their (God-given?) intelligence inventively. You have now told us your God is incapable not only of giving other organisms the intelligence to improve themselves (he is only “capable of it with preprogrammed guidance”), but he can't even give them the intelligence to want to improve. I am astonished that you can impose such limitations on your God's capabilities - or is this another case of your not quite making yourself clear? Out of interest, do you regard the will to survive as “natural”, or does God have to guide individual organisms to want to survive and then guide them into finding out how to do it? 
 
DAVID: ...Why are humans here? An extremely improbable event.
Dhw: All of life is an extremely improbable event, and every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder is an extremely improbable event. That still doesn't tell us why God had to design the monarch's migration, the weaverbird's nest and the duck-billed platypus in order to produce/feed humans.
DAVID: With all the extremely improbables, and lets add the sudden origin of our fine-tuned universe to the list, I don't see why you can't accept the idea of God running everything. Something is a first cause.-Once again: your first cause is a sourceless, unknown, unknowable, conscious, single mind that deliberately creates billions of solar systems that come and go for no apparent reason etc. (Do I need to repeat the etc.?) This is so irrational that you yourself have said many times that it requires a gigantic leap of faith - just like the faith needed to believe that the mechanism for life, reproduction and evolution could assemble itself by chance. 
And we still don't know why your God had to design the nest etc. in order to produce/feed humans.