New Miscellany 1: theodicy, evolution, cellular intelligence (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 25, 2025, 09:21 (10 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

dhw: You have totally ignored the whole context of this theory! So-called good and so-called evil are not side effects but evaluations created by us humans solely according to our own interests! They are the direct results of a free-for-all – bbband a free-for-all is the very opposite of your view of your all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful Godbbb, who started out with the sole purpose of creating us and our food, deliberately created all the “good” but was powerless to prevent the bad, or alternatively, we should ignore the bad because he deliberately created so much good, and that makes you happy.

DAVID: You gloss over the fact of our free will from God allows humans to create evil!! Free-will bugs can cause illness, but most bacteria are beneficial and cause trouble when they slip into the wrong places. Bacteria are a required part of the balance of nature.

You approved of my statement that good and evil are human inventions based entirely on what is good for US, while bacteria do what is good for them – whether we think it bad or not! You don’t seem to realize that free will is precisely what makes a free-for-all! You agree that your God gave humans and bacteria autonomy, and so we and they are responsible for our own ways of survival and for what we humans categorize as good or evil. And that is an answer to the problem of theodicy: God did not create good or evil. He simply created a free-for-all, in which every creature does what is best for itself. This applies both to behaviour (dog-eat-dog) and to design (responses to the environment). And so the free-for-all theory also removes the absurd illogicality of your theory of evolution (see below), as organisms come and go in accordance with their autonomous ability or lack of ability to cope with changing conditions.

David’s theory of evolution

DAVID: We are the current endpoint.
And:
DAVID: Evolution was a managed process, with no evidence of free-for-all.
And:
DAVID: Your usual distortion of the orderly evolutionary process which when analyzed lost 99.9% of organisms to reach the current 0.1% survivorship.

The current endpoint does not tell us what will be here in, say, a thousand million years’ time, and it does not explain the 99.9% species irrelevant to the purpose you impose on your God.
Bacteria and humans have free will which in itself offers massive evidence of a free-for-all, as does the otherwise inexplicable creation and “loss” of the irrelevant 99.9%, which you regard as evidence of your God’s messy, cumbersome inefficiency – a strange form of “managed” or “orderly” process.

Direct design versus the intelligent cell

DAVID: Which is simpler? Telling someone how to do job or directly doing it yourself?

dhw: So you would tell the factory owner to sack his 1000 employees, because it’s simpler for him to do it all himself.

DAVID: With a coded DNA conducting design, simple coding changes advance evolution. No factory involved. In your points you want organisms as freed from God as possible.

Hold on, what is this “coded DNA” that conducts design? Previously all the designs, mutations, solutions, strategies, lifestyles etc. had either been divinely preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, or your God had dabbled each one individually. Why is it unthinkable for you that the “code” is what creates the cell’s equivalent of a brain that processes all the information, decides what to do with it, and passes its instructions on to the rest of the community? Meanwhile, would you please stop trying to divert attention away from your illogical theories by pretending that my objections are somehow anti-God. They are anti your theories.

Bacteria and the intelligent cell

DAVID: Being part of an organism creates a totally different [biological] environment than as a single cell. Survival is a community problem.

dhw: Do you really believe that single-celled bacteria don’t have to find ways to survive, and when they form a biofilm in order to enhance their chances of survival, they suddenly lose their intelligence? You’ve turned it all upside down: It is the environment that creates the need for cells to form communities.

DAVID: My fault. I've correct my sentence in bold. When in an organism, cells function differently than free-living cells. Yes, environmental change forces responses.

All agreed. This simply means that if individual cells are intelligent, they will use their intelligence in different ways when they form a community. They are still intelligent, and if they are, what makes you so certain that other cell communities, whose behaviour also appears to be intelligent, cannot possibly BE intelligent?