Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by dhw, Friday, June 09, 2017, 19:12 (2723 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID (under “Milky Way”): the universe is a dangerous place for life to exist. Thank goodness we are in a quiet spot. Purposefully?
DAVID (under “Baleen Whales”): this article is presented to show another of the complexities the evolution of whales faced in becoming aquatic. And remember whales have to handle the metabolism of salt water, too much of which will kill a mammal. My question is still why did God bother?
DAVID: (under “Homo sapiens 350,000 years ago”): this branch appears to be possibly a pre-branch before more modern H. sapiens appeared?[/i]

dhw: Apparently all this makes “perfect sense” once you accept that humans were "the" goal (not even one of several goals) right from the start. How could your God possibly have created homo sapiens without crunching galaxy clusters 2.4 billion light years away at temperatures reaching 1.7 million degrees Celsius, and without organizing the complex evolution of the whale (though even you don’t know why he bothered), and without producing lots of different pre-sapiens and even contemporary homos, and without accidents like bacterial diseases, and without personally designing the weaverbird’s nest and teaching the monarch how to navigate and camouflaging the cuttlefish and showing the wasp how to lay its eggs on the spider’s back? It’s not at all disjointed. Just don’t look for the joints.

DAVID: It all makes perfect 'jointed' sense if you accept that God is in control, uses evolutionary processes to produce His desires, of which humans are the primary goal. He prefers a bush of life which provides energy for evolution of life to continue for very long periods. He evolved the universe and the current condition of the Earth. Do you accept that approach as reasonable?

But you have told us that God might not be in control of the dangerous universe and the nasty bacteria and various other “accidents”. So he’s in control but he’s not in control. Yes, if he exists, we agree that he uses evolutionary processes to produce his desires, but what ARE his desires, and how do they fit in with the history of life as we know it? One moment you say humans are his only purpose, the next they are his primary purpose, and sometimes it's just "a" purpose, but whichever it is, even you don’t know why he bothered to design all those pre-whales, let alone the actual whale. Not much of a link there, according to you. Yes, we agree that he would have created a system that led to a bush of life, and to life continuing for a long time, but that has nothing to do with the production of homo sapiens. It would still apply if humans had never walked the planet and if they ceased to walk the planet tomorrow. And yes, if he exists, he would have created the universe and the Earth and life itself and the mechanisms for evolution. But colliding galaxy clusters (no doubt more to come 2.4 billion years from now), bacterial diseases, dangerous asteroids, the all-important weaverbird’s nest, and all those pre-humans and different branches of humans just because he who is in control only wanted to produce homo sapiens? No, I don’t see that as “perfect jointed sense”.