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

by dhw, Thursday, October 20, 2016, 07:29 (2957 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Pathways are not abilities. Pathways are choices. Intelligence is the cognitive ability to choose or even invent pathways.
DAVID: In the antibiotic experiment, the drug blocks a pathway, but like any algorithm the surviving bacteria simply and automatically shift to pathway 2. There may be a pathway 3 to shift to next.

In the great big world, there are millions of problems, all of different kinds. Bacteria have found solutions to them all. Did God give them millions of automatic “shifts” to counter every single one of them? Or does he do a dabble whenever there’s a new one? Or did he give them the means to find their own solutions? That is the theistic choice.

dhw: 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.
DAVID: And I point to the need for a balance of nature to supply the food energy for life to persist.

Don’t forget “in order to produce humans”. So God taught or preprogrammed false vipers, butterflies and cuttlefish to camouflage themselves. Life couldn’t have gone on if he hadn’t, and so there would have been no humans.

DAVID: He has his own reasons for actions we see.
dhw: 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?
DAVID: Illogical to you, just as yours are to mine.

I can only quote your marvellous comment a few days ago: “I don’t believe God follows human logic in what he does.” Since you believe that God preprogrammes or dabbles, you clearly believe that these hypotheses are NOT compatible with human logic. And so on the assumption that you are human (though in my admiration for you, I sometimes wonder if you aren’t superhuman), you find them illogical.