Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 22, 2016, 21:48 (3107 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: What I can imagine is a God who creates an autonomous, inventive mechanism the purpose of which is to seek its own means of survival and improvement. THAT would explain the bush and the extinctions and every other characteristic of evolutionary history.-No it does not explain the weird animals in the bush. Both the whale and the giraffe require enormous physiologic changes to adapt to those body forms. I don't view them as improvements, but complexifications. There is a wide difference in the two words.
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> DAVID: We have a beginning (bacteria) and an endpoint (us) but your 'how' questions are what bother you about this. I would like to understand the 'how' but from a different viewpoint; I'm interested, you are critical. Would you be less critical if you understood fully how evolution works? Well, we have to work with what we have.
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> dhw: It is the gearing of all forms of life to humanity that I criticize for the reason given above, and because I am interested, I look for an alternative ‘how'. Working with what we have, I have offered you one, but you are so fixed on your God controlling every step that you in turn cannot imagine him deliberately setting up a mechanism that can act without his control. And yet, conversely, you insist that he did precisely that with humans by giving them free will.-The mechanism of evolution with God's control is not the same as giving us consciousness with free will. We then have to deal with the moral concepts of right and wrong. No other animal has to worry about that, and can on on eating each other at will.->> dhw: But you yourself have frequently referred to God making man in his own image, so it must be possible that he and we have certain attributes in common. After all, you also suggested that he wanted a relationship with us. He could hardly do that if he and we were 100% “different in kind”.-Our image relationship is He is consciousness or mind and we also have both, but not to His magnitude. Difference in degree.