Natures wonders: repairing broken bird feathers (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 04, 2018, 13:07 (2362 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: … It is logically easier for God to do it Himself than invent a mechanism so the organisms do it. Keeping them simple, rather than more complex.

dhw: I don’t follow your logic in claiming that a single invention (autonomous intelligence) is logically less “easy” than billions of personal interventions and specially devised computer programmes to be passed down through thousands of millions of years to produce knotty nests and self-healing feathers and fishy camouflage and parasitic wasps and navigating butterflies, and all of them – extant and extinct – designed to keep life going until your God could produce the brain of Homo sapiens.

DAVID: If you follow the logic that comes from a goal of humans, it is easier to guide the whole process than design inventive organisms that might veer off course unless they have enough guidelines to their inventions.

If you follow the logic that comes from a goal of humans, it must seem mighty weird that 99% of species “veered off course”, and we have to have knotty nests and fishy camouflage and migrating monarchs in order to design the brain of Homo sapiens. But even in my free-for-all, your God can always dabble if he wants to.

dhw: The same autonomous intelligence argument applies to the arching palate and dropping larynx under “complex speech”.

DAVID: […] Both changes occurred simultaneously in the fossil found, not a chance occurrence.

dhw: I have not said it was a chance occurrence, and I am not denying the complexity of the changes. You will certainly not deny that all the changes require the cooperation of the cell communities involved. So just as with the self-healing feathers and the cuttlefish’s camouflage, you say the cooperation had to be preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, or personally dabbled. I suggest that the cooperation was engineered by the intelligent cell communities themselves (and their intelligence may have been invented by your God).

DAVID: Why ask for cell cooperation than simply doing it yourself, which is probably God's view since He is in charge.

Cell cooperation is essential to all forms of life. If you think billions of computer programmes and personal interventions for each form of cooperation are simpler than a single invention, then so be it.