Natures wonders: bacteria can spear amoebas (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 24, 2017, 18:38 (2646 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Your one suggestion of liking to experiment may apply to God. all we know is He took His time. Endpoint always the same, the most complex result in the universe: the human brain.

DAVID: We do know the brain took a very long time to appear, and for no good reason based on competitive survival or environmental pressures. And it appears designed. I've picked a cause, you haven't.

dhw: As usual you ignore the fact that if competitive survival and/or environmental pressures were the ONLY factors, there would have been no need for ANY evolution beyond bacteria.

You haven't explained why evolution went beyond bacteria. Someone had to be pushing it.

dhw: ALL living things “appear designed”, and you keep telling us that your God did ALL the designing, even though there was only one thing he really wanted to design! What “cause” have you picked? That your God wanted to produce the human brain and therefore he designed a few billion other organisms, lifestyles and natural wonders until he was able to do it, though being all-powerful he could do anything. Non sequiturs ad absurdum.

We don't know that the only thing God wanted was our brain. I point that out as His goal, but you seize it as the only thing on His mind. We have to work from the history we see. He created a huge bush of life. Yes, He might be all-powerful, but He made His own choices as to the time to take to achieve it all. We see the history, why question it? You create your own absurdities by questioning His decisions apparent in the history.

dhw: Here’s a different possible cause: organisms strive to improve as well as to survive, though the two purposes may coincide, since an innovation may improve an organism’s chances of survival. The sapiens brain is the result of a natural progression from earlier brains as hominins sought improvement, though we cannot know whether the brain’s expansion was caused by or was the cause of enhanced awareness (because nobody knows the source of consciousness). If you are talking about a first cause, three equally problematical options: chance, your God, matter and energy with evolving consciousnesses.

We know of changes that did not enhance survival but complicated it, the whales. And as for consciousness, an inorganic universe cannot invent consciousness. That is a pipe dream.