Natures wonders: ants farm fungus for food (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, April 16, 2017, 16:09 (2776 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: So 3.8 billion years ago your God preprogrammed the monarch’s repeated metamorphosis and navigation in order to keep life going until he achieved his one and only purpose of producing humans. And yet “a brain can program and produce a DNA that can answer any problem a bacteria might face…”

You understand the 'brain' in that sentence is God's.

dhw:Bearing in mind the absolutely amazing variety of problems faced by brainless bacteria – almost infinitely greater than the range of those faced by butterflies

How do you know that bacterial lives are more complex than butterflies? Extremophiles are fully adapted to their environments and handle them in a simple matter as a result.

dhw: I’m a little surprised at your authoritative announcement that a butterfly brain can’t solve the problem of finding milkweed without God’s specific instructions or personal guidance.

It's not finding the milkweed that is amazing, it's the travelling thousands of miles between patches by an amazing migratory mechanism that is at issue, while the bacteria exists in a cubic millimeter. Further, you made no comment about metamorphosis, because God is the only answer for that complex biological event.

DAVID’s comment (under “Natures wonders”) : ...the issue is not that the brain works efficiently, it is how did this spider reach its current form, bit by bit or all at once? All at once by design seems most logical.

dhw: Same problem. With my theist hat on, I can’t help wondering why a brain given by your God (whose sole purpose was to produce humans) which can solve any of the problems bacteria solve, should be unable to design its own variation on existing methods and mechanisms for capturing its prey.

Your theist hat is wildly askew. You skipped my comment about bit by bit. Either a jumping spider can plot its leap trajectory from the beginning of its life or it doesn't eat. This is design at its finest.

DAVID: Bacterial lifestyle is simplicity itself. Your lifestyle is highly complex, yet you might have no free will? Your broad principal doesn't work.

dhw: Free will was an example of how your God might willingly give up control over his creations. With your insistence that your God preprogrammes even brainy organisms to look intelligent though they’re not, and that God knows the outcome of all his processes in advance, you leave wide open the possibility of predestination – the belief that “God has decided everything that will happen and that people cannot change this” (Longman). That is why I gave the example of free will, which I know you believe in, to illustrate that maybe he sacrificed control and therefore does NOT know everything in advance.

I agree we have free will given by God, and He understood in advance all the mistakes we would make. They are obvious given any thought about it. Predestination is a real stretch, which implies knowing which specific human will rape or murder. Individual free will denies that capability.