Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, January 09, 2022, 13:34 (1047 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A God who deliberately designs a system that allows mistakes and diseases is not a kindly God as we have discussed in theodicy.

And there’s you blaming me whenever I “humanize” God, and yet dismissing a logical theory on the grounds that it makes God seem “unkindly”.You and Adler agreed the other day that the chances of him loving us are 50/50! This is what we call “double standards”.

DAVID: In your desire to escape a designing God who deliberately heads for His exact goals…..

According to you his “exact goal” was to design humans plus their food, and so he deliberately designed countless life forms that had no connection with humans and their food. One of my alternative theories (you ignore the others) is that his exact goal was to create a vast variety of life forms which, you have agreed, would provide “something surprising and unpredictable” for him to watch.

DAVID:… you have create a God who invites chaos. I don't want Him, and do not accept that distortion of a concept of God.

I don’t know your criteria for what constitutes “chaos”. It seems to me, though, that there is solid logic behind a view of the history of life in which intelligent organisms search autonomously for different means of survival in ever changing conditions. For them to survive, there has to be order of some kind. Every econiche has its natural balance, but when conditions change, the balance changes, and some forms perish, some forms adapt, and new forms emerge. Hence the ever changing, ever surprising and unpredictable history of life. Your all-knowing God would have known that his invention of autonomous intelligences would NOT lead to chaos. What is your problem?

DAVID (later:)The large bush is necessary to provide enough food. And again, a distortion, God does not need entertainment. but free-willed humans will/are certainly interesting.

I do not believe that every econiche for the last 3.X billion years was “necessary” to provide food for humans. Stop dodging. Why do you use the word”need”? An all–powerful God would create what he WANTED to create, and so you have agreed that he WANTED to create something surprising and unpredictable to watch. You wrote: “I can’t disagree to this form.” So don’t change this form from “want” to “need”.

Antibiotic resistance
DAVID: In an eat or be eaten world it is only logical that all organisms have defense systems as this article shows, in case the wrong folks mix together. In dhw's imagined God's free-for-all world this outcome is ordained to happen.

Yes, I’d say your God would have known that freedom would result in conflict as well as cooperation, and in defence as well as attack. What’s wrong with that?

DAVID: In the real God's reality, it is required by necessary diversification to form sustaining ecosystems for the food supply. So I view bad infectious diseases as unescapable bad luck, not my God's doing.

Do you know the “real” God? Of course defence systems are required if organisms are to survive. Any intelligent organism will know that it has to defend itself! I don’t know why your all-powerful God would design a system in which he is powerless to stop “bad luck”! It makes more sense to me that an all-powerful God would simply design the system he wanted to design.

Biofilms
dhw: The ability to absorb information, remember it, pass it on to other cells and cooperate with them, and reach decisions relating to countless different situations, may have been designed by God. It would be interesting to know what other attributes you consider necessary before you accept that the possessor is autonomously intelligent.

DAVID: Proof that cells initiate their own thoughts/ideas.

Proof is not an attribute. Please tell us what attributes convince you that humans are autonomously intelligent.

Zebrafish inner ear
DAVID: Same distortion of my guesses about God.

dhw: I have quoted your own words. Please explain what has been distorted.

DAVID: Evolution is totally connected in stepwise development. Humans are fully connected to God's process of designed evolution which you deny in a distortion.

I have never denied common descent, which = ALL life forms descend from earlier forms (= stages), and I have never denied that humans are part of that process. You have left out your theory that ALL forms, including those that had no connection with God, were “part of the goal of evolving [= designing] humans” plus food, and your dismissal of experimentation as “weak”. No distortion there, then.

DAVID: My guesses about God are necessarily couched in human terms, but that does make my view of Him humanized as you weakly attempt to do.

So your “human terms” like “kindly” and “interested” and “enjoy” are not human, and mine – like “interested” and “enjoy” – are.