Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by dhw, Sunday, June 11, 2017, 17:13 (2721 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your view is the difference between belief and non-belief. I explain God and his motives from the facts I see.
dhw: The above has nothing to do with belief and non-belief. These discussions are a joint quest to find some kind of explanation for all the mysteries with which we are confronted. In emphasizing the complexities of living organisms, you do a magnificent job in putting the case for your God’s existence, but when it comes to guessing at his motives and methods, your arguments seem to me to be full of holes. These are not filled by claiming that you are a believer and I am an agnostic. I have even offered a theistic alternative which you agreed DID fit the facts as we see them!
DAVID: My explanations of His motives are methods are just guesses, based on my beliefs about his capabilities and his thoughts about us. We've been over this many times.

We have indeed. The existence, nature, motives and methods of a possible God, the workings of evolution, the mysteries of life and consciousness – they are all the raison d’être of this website. We examine all the theories, and we ask awkward questions to see if the theories will stand up to scrutiny. You have quite rightly questioned your own theory today in your “whale hearing” post, though ignoring my own question:

dhw: But what is surprising is your insistence that your God prepared the pre-whale for marine life before it entered the water. So how much of all this do you think was divinely dabbled, and how much was caused by a perhaps God-given internal drive for improvement, as the cell communities adapted to a “complete marine life cycle”?
DAVID: My answer is still 'why bother' since it involved so many complex adaptations. Why take the hard path when there are easier ones?

Precisely. And you could ask the same question about the knotty weaverbird’s nest, the complexities of the monarch butterfly’s lifestyle and migration, and indeed about the labyrinthine path to homo sapiens. It is a question that undermines the whole theory that your God created the universe in order to produce homo sapiens. And it opens up the path for alternatives, both theistic and atheistic. Your comment under “Plant extremophiles” and the extraordinary tale of the zombified beetles may point the way:

David’s comment: There seem to be few limits to where life cannot go.

And indeed to the ways in which organisms find ways to survive. Viewed from a theistic perspective, if we are trying to guess at God’s motives and methods, it’s quite difficult to imagine him preprogramming or dabbling these funguses and extremophiles. Why bother? And if his sole purpose was to produce homo sapiens, well, surely there must have been easier paths. Perhaps it’s less difficult to imagine, for instance, that this astonishing variety of life that comes and goes is the result of him designing a mechanism which enables organisms to do their own inventing, to design their own ways of surviving, and even improving their mode of living. If the show was an end in itself, we wouldn’t have to ask “why bother?” And if homo sapiens were not the only goal, we wouldn’t have to ask why he didn’t take the easier path.