Natures wonders: seabirds food finding flight patterns (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 18, 2020, 15:52 (1678 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Saturday, April 18, 2020, 16:10

dhw: The question is indeed how the established strategy first arose. It makes no difference whether it was these birds or their ancestors: the fact remains that trial and error involves trying things out, learning from mistakes, and eventually coming up with a solution that works. According to you, God designs everything, in which case there would have been no trial and error because according to you he knows everything in advance and never makes mistakes. Your last sentence is a give-away: “no sign of much intelligent realization”. Why must you quantify? Either your God designed the strategy, or the birds worked it out for themselves (probably learning by trial and error), regardless of how "much" intelligence it took. Ditto all the other natural wonders.

The give-away is my actual feeling. I strongly doubt the birds are capable of trial and error, which occurs at the human level of mentation. All we know is they have an instinctual flight pattern and we are stuck in that we have no studies on how instincts develop. Our discussion developed from a human thought about trial and error as a posibility. Yes, it is a possibility, nothing more.

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DAVID: You push me to explain what God does. All I can do is make intelligent guesses based on my view of God, which is directly opposed to your humanized version.

dhw: I don’t push you. You keep telling us exactly what God does, and I challenge the logic of your exact statements. That is when you say that they are guesses, and I mustn’t ask for exactitude. The lack of coherence has nothing to do with the alternatives I offer. He wants to test us: oops, maybe he doesn’t. God is in complete charge and can do anything he wants whenever wants to. But “we don’t know if God can make life work perfectly” and “God knew some bacteria and viruses would cause problems. Therefore He gave us a huge brain with a giant conceptual area with which to work and solve problems.” So he designed them in such a way that they would cause problems, and let's ignore all the other life forms throughout the history of life and of bad viruses and all the humans who now suffer and/or die because of the baddies. It’s OK, because 315,000 years ago, God gave us huge brains to solve the problems. We are of course back to theodicy, but that is NOT my focus, which is YOUR exact statements about your God’s purpose, method and nature and the constant stream of contradictions and illogicalities that arise from them.

Again they are your illogicalities: Real interpretation: God knows some organisms may test us, but we have been given the big brain to figure out how to fight them, while we can create many useful immaterial concepts to better our lives. We are again at the problem of evil, and you have simply repeated the atheist's anthem, as I've noted before. Your problem, not mine.

DAVID: Addendum. See today's entry on giant viruses.
DAVID: Since these viruses are part of the lowest sections of the sea food web, and affect phytoplankton photosynthesis, using CO2 and producing free O2., it can be proposed they are a significant part of God's design plan.

dhw: Which has nothing to do with the problem of the destructive viruses which your God directly designed in order to test the human brain – or maybe not, depending on which day of the week it is.

Once again, your invented interpretation. Stick with maybe not.

. dhw; Here’s another theory for you: God set up all the mechanisms for life and for evolution of life, and then let those mechanisms do their own thing. No “humanizing” at all here, so you’ll have to abandon that escape route, and no intellectual knot-tying trying to find a reason why he specially designed the baddies. Can you find any logical weakness in it when you compare it to the actual history of life?

Of course humanizing!! My purposeful God does not give up control. Of course your humanized god easily relaxed and let the free-for-all begin. A casual reader might interpret this discussion differently: you want me to make up excuses for what you perceive as God's errors based on what you think your god might think. You and I are really debating two different Gods, which confuses the real issues.