Unanswered questions: a review of Adler's thoughts (General)

by dhw, Friday, August 23, 2019, 07:46 (1701 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: All levels of consciousness are immaterial, as is thought itself, and the leading question is whether the source is material or not. For those of us who believe in evolution, there is a natural progression from lower to higher levels of thought, and even you argue that your God must have tinkered with existing brains to have produced our level (although you are a dualist). I would suggest the possibility that if God exists, he didn’t have to tinker – he enabled intelligent cells to do their own tinkering, which resulted in ever greater degrees of consciousness, culminating in ours.

DAVID: Your intelligent cell theory still has God totally in charge and using cells as his agents. Just an intellectual sidestep.

dhw: My theory allows for the possibility that your God created the cells. “Totally in charge” is highly misleading, because my theory is that he would have deliberately created the mechanism to do its own designing, in contrast to your insistence that he either preprogrammed or dabbled every single innovation (not to mention lifestyle and natural wonder). Intellectual sidestep from what?

DAVID: Since God designed the mechanism for the cells to perform, I still look at Him as in charge.

Excellent. If God exists, then I agree that he is in charge, but instead of preprogramming and/or dabbling every single life form, lifestyle and natural wonder, as you would have it, he chose to design autonomous, intelligent cells to do their own designing without any further input from him (other than perhaps an occasional dabble). Of course it’s still an unproven theory, like your own, but I’m delighted that we have reached this agreement.