Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 07, 2017, 14:20 (2725 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID's comment: It stands to reason these chemical warfare antibiotics go back to the beginning of life. Beta lactamase is the chemical enzyme that fights penicillin and its relatives. It is not intelligence, it is the weapons they have at their command.
dhw: I am not disputing the history of bacterial warfare, and although eventually this discussion does link up with bacterial intelligence, the dispute here is over my suggestion that your God preprogrammed bacteria to create disease. You responded that disease was accidental. This therefore raises the vital question of your God’s control. You appear to be saying God didn’t know bacteria would cause disease (it was accidental), and yet he inserted programmes (“alternative pathways”) that some lucky bacteria accidentally switch on today in order to counter the programmes humans design to counter the diseases. I must confess, I rather like your theory that God leaves all these things to luck and accident, but that creates huge problems for your other theory that God is always in control.

DAVID: I still think accidental fits. It gets back to my view of theodicy. Evil disease exists when bacteria and viruses end up in the wrong places, just as evil people with free will and a dangerous universe exist. Part of an evolving reality. But God gave us a big brain and the challenge to solve the problems and we are doing a good job. We learn to kill bacteria. We track asteroids. We have ethical (sort of) societies to handle evil people.

Whether we are doing a good job or not is open to debate, and you’ve still got your God preprogramming some bacteria to resist countermeasures against their accidental attempted murders, but I have no objections to this theistic answer, which fits in with reality as we know it. It shows that your God has no problem giving up control, even to the point that he is willing to leave Nature to do its own thing: bacteria to cause diseases, the dangerous universe to destroy life willy-nilly. If millions of humans die in an ice age or because of a plague or because a comet crashes into the earth, so be it. He gave us a big brain, so it’s up to us to solve the problems he has created through a system of “accidents”. Of course, we shouldn’t ask what might have been his purpose in setting it all up, because that would mean trying to read his mind. And yet you cannot countenance the possibility that he might also have set up a system whereby organisms designed their own lifestyles and natural wonders. Let bacteria, ice ages and asteroids do their worst, but in the meantime he must personally design the weaverbird’s nest and teach the monarch the tricks of migration and prepare the pre-whale to enter the water. Only this section of “evolving reality” demands his total control. Purpose? Well, apparently without the nest, the migration and the blowhole, life could not have gone on long enough for him to produce humans, which was his sole purpose apart from other purposes you can’t think of. Don't you find all this a bit disjointed?