Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Thursday, June 13, 2019, 10:18 (1988 days ago) @ David Turell

I am once again telescoping threads in order to avoid repetition.

DAVID: Your theory is based on an appearance of intelligence, all of which can easily be seen as automatic responses.

dhw: And can easily be seen as real intelligence, which may or may not have been invented by your God. There is nothing in my hypothesis to contradict ID, and since your ID-ers apparently do not propose a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every undabbled innovation in the history of life, you cannot claim that their views support your hypothesis or contradict mine.

DAVID: But their ideas easily fit my theories about God's actions. They never discuss God.

I originally asked you if ANYONE supported your hypothesis that your God specially designed every life form etc., and did so for the sole purpose of getting them to eat or not eat one another until he specially designed H. sapiens. Clearly Adler doesn’t and the ID-ers don’t. It would appear, then, that you are on your own.

DAVID: Cells DO NOT have the capacity to perceive. […] I used 'perceive' in the sense of foretelling future needs. They can't do that.

dhw: I have never ever seen the word “perceive” defined as an ability to see into the future. You are making a mockery of language. Furthermore, I keep emphasizing that unlike your own, my hypothesis does NOT depend on clairvoyance: I propose that evolution happens via reactions to changing environments and not via crystal-ball-gazing.

DAVID: You are certainly a much better user of the English language, and of word meanings.

Words are the only tools we have for these discussions, but they should be used for clarification, not obfuscation. The point remains: I do not suggest that cells are clairvoyant. I suggest that they respond intelligently to new demands and opportunities.

DAVID (under “Immunity system complexity”) : Once again you are totally inconsistent. Either God can choose to evolve humans from bacteria or He shouldn't have. You can't have it both ways. Your 'logical theistic explanations' always humanize God.

dhw: 1 Once again you refuse to put your different hypotheses together. If God exists and evolution is true, then God chose to evolve ALL forms of life from bacteria. You keep ignoring the fact that your concept of evolution is that your God specially designed every single innovation, life form, lifestyle and natural wonder, including every step of human evolution. And so I keep asking why he would specially design millions of non-human life forms etc. if the only life form he wanted to specially design was us. […]

dhw: 2 How can you possibly know that your God does not have attributes in common with humans?

DAVID: 1: Evolving a future human from bacteria means all the stages and forms we see, including all the econiches for balance of food supply.

For “evolving” let us substitute what you actually mean: specially designing a human from bacteria apparently means specially designing different stages of human, plus billions of non-human life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders, such as dinosaurs, whale flippers, cuttlefish camouflage, monarch migration, the weaverbird’s nest, the salmon’s migratory reproductive system etc. Why do you think that “to get from bacteria to humans required special design of all the 'non-human elements'” extant and extinct, if your God was able to and did specially design every stage of human evolution, which apparently was the only thing he wanted? You know that there is no logical answer to this question, which is why you repeatedly skirt round it.

DAVID: 2. God may have some attributes humans have. We can only imagine about them. He is special and different than we are.

Nobody is claiming that if God exists, he is not special and different! We do not know your God’s nature, and so we can only speculate about it. Why, then, do you stick rigidly to a hypothesis for which you can find no logical explanation, and yet recognize the logic of my various theistic hypotheses, but dismiss them purely on the assumption that your God does NOT think with human-type logic?