Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 11, 2022, 07:52 (1045 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have never said he wished us evil! You dismiss my alternative theories because they “humanize” God, and because your God is “kindly” – as if that did not “humanize" him!

DAVID: It is not characterizing words that humanize. It is the way you propose actions God might take or want as free-for-all and experimenting into the future.

So when you tell us you are certain that your “kindly” God enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, you are not “humanizing” him, but when I suggest that his purpose in creating life might have been to enjoy creating something that will interest him, that is “humanizing”. And an all-powerful God who is unable to design a system without errors which he does not want and cannot correct is more powerful than a God who created exactly the system that he wanted. I find your thinking hard to follow.

DAVID:…. 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.

dhw: All theories are “unproven”, including the very existence of God. Intelligent organisms would explain why there isn’t chaos, and I do not “turn to God” but I include God as a possible first cause. I am an agnostic, not an atheist.

DAVID: Intelligent organisms can't plan for future speciation, which is the only way to explain the gaps in fossils as Cambrian or flowering plant bloom.

There is no planning for future speciation!You have agreed that speciation takes place IN RESPONSE to changing conditions and not in anticipation of them (see the thread on your theory of evolution). The gaps may be explained by the inevitable lack of fossils and/or by the ability of cells to make major changes when conditions require or allow them.

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

dhw: You keep agreeing that past food was not for present humans, and so how can it and all the past organisms that also had no connection with humans have been part of God’s one and only goal of designing humans plus food?

DAVID: You keep ignoring my point God chose to evolve us from bacteria. All of evolution connected.Your constant illogical complaint slices it into disparate parts.

If God exists, he chose to evolve ALL life forms from bacteria, and the bush of life evolved into countless separate branches or “disparate parts”, most of which had no connection with humans. So please answer the bolded question.

Antibiotic resistance:
DAVID: I'm not sure I've seen a reasonable response to this comment:

Answered on this thread on Sunday 9 January and also dealt with here:

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.

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

dhw: Finally!! We agree. He didn’t “have to” design it with errors that he didn’t want and couldn’t correct, and the diseases were not “bad luck”. He got exactly what he wanted, and it works the way he wanted it to work. Perfectly in keeping with your belief that he is all-powerful and all-knowing. And you don’t need to draw any “humanized” conclusions about whether his nature is “kindly” or not. Finally!!

DAVID: Wrong 'finally'. An all-knowing God knew which system for life would work and used it recognizing errors were probable.

That is not what you wrote, which was that he “designed the system He wanted that He knew would work”. This can only mean that he did not want "errors" he could not control, so they were not errors, and he did not try in vain to correct them. They are the consequence of freedom of choice, and what you and I consider to be a “bad” bacterium or a cell "going wrong" would, if it could talk our language, tell us that it’s simply finding its own way to survive - just like the "good" bacteria and cells which try to fight off the invaders.

Biofilms
dhw: Please tell us what attributes convince you that humans are autonomously intelligent.[…]

DAVID: The straight answer, you know, is we can only observe outward appearances of cells actions which I believe are automatic. We have free will using huge, highly complex brains.

Your beliefs and the fact that we have big brains are not attributes that denote intelligence! These, I suggest, would include the ability to absorb and process information, remember it, pass it on to fellow members of the community, cooperate with them, reach decisions, implement those decisions. Please tell us what other attributes have convinced you that your fellow humans are intelligent and are not mere automatons.