Teleology & evolution: Stephen Talbott's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 20, 2016, 18:17 (3078 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: There is no glossing over on my part. The difference between us lies in your refusal to accept the possibility of cellular intelligence. I have acknowledged a hundred times that your God MAY have created it, but you would not accept it even if I said categorically that your God MUST have created it.
DAVID: I know that is as close as you can get to recognizing intelligent design, which results in cells that look intelligent.-Ugh, they are intelligently designed to look intelligent? The theistic choice here is between cells divinely preprogrammed and cells divinely endowed with their own intelligence. And if we cannot tell the difference, we cannot dismiss either hypothesis.
 
dhw; As far as your biologic training is concerned, it may have taught you that cells are automatons, but please don't tell me it taught you that your God provided the first cells with multiple choice programmes to be passed on through countless generations of organisms and countless environmental changes, to produce every innovation and natural wonder in the history of evolution (apart from when he dabbled). Do you truly find this imagining less “wild” than the possibility that what looks intelligent might actually be intelligent?
DAVID: We look at Shapiro's bacteria only from outside and we see intelligent responses. After that all we have interpretation. I'll stay with mine that they are designed to react intelligently to stimuli.-Your last sentence fits in with my hypothesis (theistic version): your God designed them so that they would use their intelligence to react intelligently. Your version is that they are designed to react automatically to stimuli, since they can do nothing but obey God's 3.8-billion-year-old instructions on how to deal with every imaginable stimulus. Meanwhile, you continue to “gloss over” the ever multiplying complexities and anomalies of your own hypothesis. Perhaps when you return you will finally tell us which of the two hypotheses makes the greater demands on the imagination.