Bacterial Intelligence? self ID using a virus (General)

by dhw, Monday, April 22, 2019, 09:07 (2041 days ago) @ David Turell

I don't know what happened yesterday to this and my post on "Big brain evolution"! Perhaps I accidentally deleted them. My apologies!

dhw: There is no confusion. I have thanked you for your willingness to accept that intelligence is possible. If by “God running the show” you mean he directly controls everything that happened (as opposed to allowing free rein), then of course your choice is logically consistent, but the only means of control you offer are preprogramming or dabbling the “intelligent instructions” for every single bacterial problem, evolutionary innovation, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder throughout the history of life. If you yourself cannot believe in these two explanations, and cannot think of any other, I am surprised that you stick so rigidly to your choice of direct control while still maintaining that the odds are 50/50.

DAVID: You are still confused about my thinking. Of course, if God is in control, as I believe, He has methods of exerting that control. In our discussions we have come up with three possibilities: nothing but pre-programming, dabbling, or an inventive mechanism for organisms use which I insist must be under guidelines to exact God's total control. I think that covers the possibilities for evolutionary God control. But they remain possibilities. The bold above I've created in your statement is off target. '50/50' has nothing to do with evolutionary control, and only concerns the issue over obviously intelligent cellular activity which I believe is due to intelligent instructions the cell carries as a result of being created by evolution.

The only “guidelines” or “intelligent instructions” you have offered for control are preprogramming and dabbling, and the third possibility which I offer is an AUTONOMOUS inventive mechanism which may have been designed by your God. Your insistence that your God wants “total control” is what turns you off the idea of autonomous intelligence. Once you have agreed that it is possible, you are forced to agree that your God might NOT have wanted total control. And this undermines your proposal that he specially designed every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder for the sole purpose of keeping life going until he could specially design the only thing he wanted to design. The alternative is that he WANTED the unpredictability of the ever changing bush of life, and that H. sapiens was not the one and only purpose, although it also leaves open the option of dabbling when he felt like it. (See “Big brain evolution”.)