Natures wonders: bacteria can spear amoebas (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, August 25, 2017, 12:55 (2645 days ago) @ David Turell

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

Yes I have, many times, and you have even quoted it below in my comment beginning: “Here’s a different possible cause…” An in-built (possibly God-given) drive for improvement.

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.
DAVID: 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.

At long, long last you are conceding that the human brain was NOT God’s one and only purpose and everything else was related to that. (See my post under “a beetle fools ants”.)

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.
DAVID: We know of changes that did not enhance survival but complicated it, the whales.

You are assuming that there was no reason for pre-whales to enter the water. I have suggested that maybe they did so because there was more food for them in the water. Why do you think your God fiddled with them and then made them enter the water?

DAVID: And as for consciousness, an inorganic universe cannot invent consciousness. That is a pipe dream.

It is one of “three equally problematical options”. A conscious being that is simply “there” and has always been there, knows everything, had no origin, can create a universe and living organisms...Some folk would say that is a pipe dream.