Natures wonders: how plants became carnivores (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 11, 2017, 13:19 (2840 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your theistic scenario is just fine, but my question is: we see the causes of the universe and humans as either chance or design. I want a third choice from you other than those two.

As regards the origin of the universe and of the mechanisms for life and evolution (not just humans), I can only offer you my panpsychist hypothesis in which individual bits of matter “somehow” possess a rudimentary form of consciousness which evolves with time and experience – a hypothesis which I regard as no more and no less likely than your single “somehow” know-it-all-for-ever consciousness and the “somehow” blind miracle-workings of chance. However, this is totally irrelevant to the question I have now asked you three times about how carnivorous plants and frogs’ tongues may have evolved. See below.

DAVID: All you have offered is a theistic possibility of an organismal intelligence advancing evolution. Fine. If chance did not design the organisms and their intelligent design abilities, what did? I reject chance.

See above. I have agreed a thousand times that your God may have designed the autonomous intelligent mechanism.

DAVID: Life is obviously too complex to pop up by chance. I offer God, accepting pre-programming or dabbling, and I will accept your possibility the organisms are programmed to do some inventing, corrected by God as necessary. Now, is there a third agent at work to produce our reality? To me it is obvious agency, not chance, is required.

Again see above: either some sort of God or chance or an evolving panpsychist consciousness was responsible for producing life and the autonomous intelligent inventive mechanism which you have explicitly agreed is possible. So now let us go back to your theistic model of evolution, and tell me which you think is more likely: that your God preprogrammed the carnivorous plants and the frog’s tongue 3.8 billion years ago (presumably in order to keep life going until humans arrived), personally intervened to design them, or left them to do their own designing with the intelligence which you agree he might have given them?