Bacterial Intelligence? self ID using a virus (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 23, 2019, 17:09 (2039 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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”.) [David’s bold]

DAVID: Note the bold. I've never agreed to the idea that God did not want total control. We have discussed it, but I have always rejected it. I have emphasized that strong evidence exists in all we know of history and biology to show that God is intensely purposeful.

dhw: Of course if God exists he must have had a purpose in creating life in all its different forms. But that does not mean he specially designed all the different forms, or that his purpose for doing so was that they should eat or not eat one another until he specially designed H. sapiens! Perhaps I did not make my control argument clear. If you were to accept the concept of cellular intelligence, i.e. that your God deliberately created a mechanism whereby organisms did their own designing autonomously, you would be forced to abandon your fixed hypothesis that your God wanted total control. Hence perhaps your vehement opposition to it, despite your 50/50 odds either way. In any case, you have repeatedly accepted the possibility that your God did not actually have total control, e.g. 5 February under “God and Evolution”:

DAVID: I have clearly stated God may be unlimited or limited. History allows both possibilities…
dhw: One day you clearly state that he is in full control, and the next you say he may have limits.

dhw: The concept of autonomous cellular intelligence allows for God’s powers to be unlimited, but for him to have made the choice to give up control – just as you believe he has done by giving humans free will. In both cases, he would have established a system based on the principle of “Let’s see what happens…” – though always allowing himself the option of dabbling.

We are debating a totally purposeful God, my view, vs. a tentative God which I think is your view. Of course, I've admitted God may have limits, but my position is I strongly doubt it. Since you live in doubt, you will posit all sorts of possibilities about God. I am sure will have some areas of agreement, but more than likely it will be mostly disagreements.