Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, January 09, 2022, 15:34 (830 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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”.

I don't think a God who produced us would wish us evil, or create what we humans regard as evil.

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

dhw: 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.

A purposeful God does not need self entertaining, again twisting my guesses about God. The vast diversity forms ecosystems for food, a point you purposely minimize.

DAVID:… you have created 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....Your all-knowing God would have known that his invention of autonomous intelligences would NOT lead to chaos. What is your problem?

Free-for-all leads to chaos. Your intelligent organisms are your sole saving unproven theory, in which you turn to God to save your theories.

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.

dhw: I do not believe that every econiche for the last 3.X billion years was “necessary” to provide food for humans.

Past food for past organisms. Dodging again by slicing and dicing evolution

Antibiotic resistance

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.

dhw: 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.

Finally!! Yes, God designed the system He wanted that He knew would work.

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.

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

Observed attributes from outside the organisms are comparisons, not proof of origin.

Zebrafish inner ear

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.

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

Silly. All the terms we both use are human. There are no specific 'God' terms