Natures wonders: how plants became carnivores (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, February 11, 2017, 15:46 (2840 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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?

Your panpsychist third way is consciousness without God's consciousness. You've just offered a subset of the God hypothesis, that is all. Why not call that type of consciousness God? Whatever the first cause is, humans are here. Principle: God guided evolution to produce humans. Under that umbrella, all of your above thoughts are possible. We've settled it.