Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 17, 2016, 12:40 (2740 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Yes. I think early bacterial life came with most abilities on board.
dhw: I must say I prefer “abilities” to programmes. The ability to solve countless problems (= intelligence) must indeed have been there from the start.DAVID: Parallel pathways are the 'abilities' I have in mind as responses to stimuli or problems. Are you really agreeing to pre-planning?

Pathways are not abilities. Pathways are choices. Intelligence is the cognitive ability to choose or even invent pathways. As regards pre-planning, God (if he exists) would certainly have been the inventor of cellular intelligence (if it exists), and it is perfectly logical to assume that he would have had a reason for inventing it. The higgledy-piggledy history of evolution suggests that he would have planned for the history of evolution to be higgledy-piggledy through the autonomous intelligence he invented! (But he may have occasionally dabbled, which might explain the extra degrees of human consciousness.) That is the theistic “pre-planning” that I would extrapolate logically from all the evidence available to us.

Dhw: Why on earth would they need to talk to each other if God had already built it in? First A is aware that B has something he hasn’t got, then he and B have a chat about it, and the two of them reach agreement to do a swap. You could hardly have come up with a better illustration of intelligent, sentient, cognitive, cooperative, decision-making behaviour. Thank you.
DAVID: By 'talk to each other' I meant molecular signaling stimuli. They have to communicate in some way for the swaps to occur.

Precisely. Molecular signalling is their way of communicating. They have to be aware of their differences, communicate what they are each aware of, and reach agreement to do the swap. A great example of intelligent behaviour.

DAVID: I don't believe God follows human logic in what He does.
dhw: But you seem to believe that he follows YOUR human logic. This sounds to me as if you accept the logicality of my arguments, realize that your own are illogical, but reckon God prefers your illogical way of thinking to mine.
DAVID: No. I admit I'm using my logic to try to discern His, but I've always admitted in the past that He has His own reasons for actions we see.

Yes of course he does (if he exists). But since your interpretation of his reasons is so palpably illogical, and since the alternative I offer is so much more logical, why discount mine?