Bacterial motors carefully studied: Addendum (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 17, 2016, 12:59 (2925 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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....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: If you could tell us where God would put 'intelligence' into bacteria, or into animals who only understand danger of injury as prey animals, I would agree. In bacteria I only see automaticity. In animals fear, not the ability to plan new species improvements.-If you could tell us where God put his 3.8-billion-year computer programme into bacteria (though not even you believe he did), or - the only remaining alternative you have mentioned so far - exactly how and why he personally “guided” chosen individual organisms into multicellularity and then into producing every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution all for the sake of humans, I would agree that your own hypothesis is feasible. Why do you confine animals to fear, when every post you offer us - including Frans de Waal's - emphasizes the vast range of their cognitive abilities? But of course there is no evidence that they can plan new species improvements. Yet again: NOBODY knows how innovations took place. Meanwhile, how about the will to survive - natural or unnatural?-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.
dhw: 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 […]
DAVID: Of course, faith requires a leap. Do you ever think positively about not 'how' but 'why' humans exist?-You could not see why I didn't accept “the idea of God running everything”. If the answer is so blindingly obvious, I wonder why you asked the question. In response to your new question, I have previously suggested that if your God exists, he may have created life and humans in order to relieve his eternal boredom. “Positive” enough? You didn't like that, though, because although you regard humans as being in God's image, you don't like to see him as being anything like humans. Why do YOU think he created humans?