Biological complexity: protozoa sans mitochondria (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, May 23, 2016, 12:53 (3106 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
DAVID: 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.-We don't know why the pre-whale took to water or the pre-giraffe to neck-stretching, but that makes no difference to how it was done. Whether they/God said: “Yippee, this will improve things” or “Yippee, this will complexify things”, your organisms were preprogrammed or dabbled with, and mine were given the means to make their own improvements/complexifications. As regards purpose, your God also said, somewhat cryptically: “I'm complexifying the pre-whale and the pre-giraffe, because my aim is to produce humans.” Mine said, "Just do what you wanner do." Which of those is more likely to lead to the higgledy-piggledy bush?
 
dhw: …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.
DAVID: 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.-I am not comparing an evolutionary free-for-all to moral choice! My point is that your God was willing to set up “a mechanism that can act without his control”. If he gave humans a freedom of choice between right and wrong, he could also have given other organisms the freedom to work out their own ”complexifications”. -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”.
DAVID: Our image relationship is He is consciousness or mind and we also have both, but not to His magnitude. Difference in degree.-You are playing with words. Having a relationship with someone does not mean comparing levels of consciousness. If your God's purpose was to create humans, he must have had a reason. You suggested a relationship with us. You also clearly believe that he is aware of right and wrong: otherwise how could he give us the choice? Once you open the door to human attributes, you can hardly close it if I suggest one (boredom) you don't like. God's boredom, stuck there in eternity with nothing but himself to be conscious of, would certainly be of a magnitude far exceeding ours.