Natures wonders: seabirds food finding flight patterns (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, April 19, 2020, 17:27 (1677 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.

DAVID: 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.

One reason why our discussions become so difficult is that you are constantly changing your terms. Here is the exchange that started the discussion on trial and error:
dhw: Generally you insist that all Nature’s wonders (like the weaverbird's nest) are performed by automatons obeying God’s instructions or “guidelines”, whereas I propose that these life forms have autonomous intelligence.

DAVID: This is not a sign of bird intelligence. It might well be an instinct from trial and error with loss of lots of birds from hunger. (dhw's bold)

“It might well be” has now changed to “I strongly doubt”. Perhaps you hadn’t realized that trial and error was an admission of intelligence. So the next step is to change your opinion and then to point out that we don’t know the origin of strategies that are now instinctive. Very true, but since the strategies behind all Nature’s wonders bear all the hallmarks of intelligence, perhaps you might consider withdrawing remarks such as “this is not a sign of bird intelligence”, and instead at the very least substituting your usual odds of 50/50.

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. […] 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.

DAVID: 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.

Theodicy is a problem for the religious who believe that their God is all powerful and all good. However, I emphasized that my focus was NOT on that, but on the illogicalities and contradictions arising from your personal and “exact” beliefs regarding God’s actions and motives. You state unequivocally that your all-powerful God designed the bad viruses, and he did so in order to test us. How do you know either of these claims, and why would he want to test us? Nothing to do with atheism. Please answer. Meanwhile:

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?

DAVID: 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.

Please tell me why it is more “humanizing” and “purposeful” to create a free-for-all than to maintain total control. (See also free will in my post about your theory of evolution). And just in case you skip my request above, please tell me your purposeful God’s purpose in testing us with nasty viruses.

DAVID: 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.

I have not suggested that God made any errors! It is you who make exact statements about your God’s nature (omniscient and all-controlling), purposes (designing humans and testing them) and methods (spending 3.X billion years not designing the only thing he wants to design). At least one of these beliefs only makes sense if your God made errors! So let me inform the casual reader that in the first instance I am challenging the logic of these exact statements in relation both to the history of evolution and to the nature of God. In the second instance, I offer different alternative views of both, which even David admits are logical.