Natures wonders: ants farm fungus for food (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, April 22, 2017, 11:32 (2770 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] I put forward one of only two answers that you have ever offered: God gave them personal lessons (“God told them”). The other is that he preprogrammed the monarch-metamorphosis-migration instruction manual 3.8 billion years ago, although his only desire was to produce humans. No, “I don’t follow your logic at all.”
DAVID: The logic is the Texas monarchs had no idea where to find milkweed for the wintertime in Texas, but they did. Somehow they prepared metabolically for the long journey. God must have helped in my view. Logical. Setting out helter-skelter simply leads to death.

You have missed my point. Originally, they would have set out “helter-skelter”, and many would have died. But those that found the milkweed would have passed on the information, and so the route would have become established. Nobody knows how they survived the long journey, but I really don’t know why your God would have given them courses in physical training and navigation when all he wanted to do was produce humans.

Dhw: Your all-powerful God would be perfectly capable of designing a mechanism enabling organisms to saltate.
DAVID: Again Tony's point with god watching.
dhw: […] At last you seem to be agreeing that if God exists, he may have designed the autonomous intelligence that designs saltations and then sat back to watch the great variety produced by his invention. But you will no doubt dismiss the idea again tomorrow.
DAVID: I'm sure He watches and adjusts as necessary. I've agreed that an IM might exist to create the changes under His guidelines. I think tony agrees.

“Guidelines” is one of your nice woolly expressions. If God created an autonomous inventive mechanism (intelligence), it would have worked autonomously. “Adjusts as necessary”? Do you mean the monarch turned left instead of right so God redirected it? The weaverbird’s knot came undone, so God gave it a twiddle? What other “guidelines” do you have in mind for the autonomous mechanism?

DAVID: The bush provides the energy for life to take time to evolve to produce humans. If God directly produced humans without the bush, what would humans eat?
dhw: I would suggest that your now unlimited God was perfectly capable of providing food for humans without personally designing the weaverbird’s nest […]And so maybe he did not design them at all, or maybe if he did design them, he did not design them in order to provide food for humans.
DAVID: You cannot get around the fact that all organisms needed food energy until humans arrived, and all including humans still do.

I do not see how the blindingly obvious fact that all organisms needed food, still need food, and will go on needing food proves that God designed the weaverbird’s nest and every other natural wonder throughout the history of life so far, only in order that humans could have food.