Bacterial Intelligence and Evolution (General)

by dhw, Friday, May 10, 2019, 11:54 (2022 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: We can spend the rest of our lives detailing every single special feature of every single species! Yes, they all have different methods of breast feeding. So what is your explanation: that either your God, whose only purpose was to design H. sapiens, provided the first living cells with a programme for every form of breastfeeding that you can think of, or he popped in to adjust all the glands and nipples? I propose that the different cell communities designed their own modes of breastfeeding as best suited to the requirements of the environment.

DAVID: I will never believe that such steps as breast feeding under water developed without
mental planning.

I also believe that such changes in cellular structures must be the result of mental activity. The difference between us is that you claim breasts were changed in advance by your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for breast feeding, or by his performing operations on individual organisms, whereas I suggest the changes took place through cellular response to the organisms going under water.

DAVID: Your human logic refuses to accept the method God had the absolute right to choose.

dhw: Yet again: my human logic, in keeping with your own (“you have no idea why…”) refuses to accept your INTERPRETATION of your God’s method: i.e. that he specially designed every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder, and did so in order to enable organisms to eat or not each one another until he specially designed the only thing he wanted to design.

DAVID: I simply say: it was God's choice of method.

And I say how do you know, and why do you assume that he chose a method you cannot understand whereas there are alternatives which you can understand?

dhw: I don’t make a decision; I offer alternatives, all of which – as you have repeatedly agreed and in contrast to your fixed interpretation – make for perfectly logical interpretations.

DAVID: I would change your bolded statement to say : 'I can't make a decision', and I would add you have the absolute right not to.

dhw: Fair enough. That is no defence of your insistence that only your decision can be valid, even though you have no idea why your God would have chosen the method you attribute to him.

DAVID: I don't have to know why He made he choice He did. Only you want it.

Again you take it as a fact that he chose to specially design thousand of non-human life forms to eat or not eat one another until he finally specially designed the only thing he wanted to specially design: H. sapiens. I want to know what logical reason you can find for this interpretation of his choice – but you have no idea.