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

by David Turell , Sunday, June 26, 2016, 15:30 (3072 days ago) @ dhw

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.
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> dhw: 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.-I'm back, unchanged. I don't see the complexities you see. I don't imagine that bacteria are intelligent. They are intelligently designed. Period.