Natures wonders: bacteria can spear amoebas (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 22, 2017, 08:47 (2651 days ago) @ David Turell

I’M NOT SURE WHAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY. I HAD A VISITOR, BUT I THOUGHT I’D ALREADY POSTED ALL MY RESPONSES BEFORE SHE CAME. IT SEEMS I ONLY DRAFTED THEM AND THEN FORGOT TO SUBMIT THEM! MANY APOLOGIES.

DAVID: It is fun to try to anthropomorphize God, as long as we recognize we have no idea of how to imagine His personality. He might well have a non-serious side and actually enjoy taking time to make specially designed forms of life on the way to the 'brain', which, by the way, can recognize His existence.

dhw: Well, at least the idea of enjoyment does away with the impossible task of finding some connection between all these wonderful designs and your all-powerful God’s alleged one and only purpose of producing the human brain (perhaps the most entertaining wonder of them all).

DAVID: That comment always brings me back to 'everyone has got to eat' along the way to the brain. We have no answer to the question as to why God took so long to get there. But that is what happened.

What happened certainly happened. But of course that does not mean it happened in the way or for the purpose you have conjured up in your imagination. I have offered you several theistic answers (afterthought, experimentation, not knowing how to do it), but they don’t fit in with your subjective interpretation of your God’s mind: an all-powerful God’s only purpose was to produce the human brain, and although you can’t make head or tail of why he would personally design the eight-stage whale and the monarch’s lifestyle and the weaverbird’s nest, or take so long to fulfil his one and only purpose, it has to be true because that is what you believe.
There was once the nicest of thinkers
Who insisted on wearing his blinkers.
When it came to design
His vision was fine,
But the rest of his theories were stinkers.