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

by dhw, Monday, June 27, 2016, 17:56 (3071 days ago) @ David Turell

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.-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.-DAVID: 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.-Aw, come on. You don't see the complexities involved in providing the first cells with a computer programme to create every single innovation and natural wonder in the 3.8-billion- year history of life on Earth so far (possibly even with multiple choices to select from), and to equip bacteria with the solution to every single problem - all this to be passed down through millions of generations and organisms, surviving countless environmental changes that may or may not have been planned as well? You don't see these complexities? And yet you complain when atheists don't see the complexities of organisms as evidence for design. (See the “Sex” thread for more on this and for dabbling.)