New Miscellany 2: brain, evolution, intelligence (General)

by dhw, Monday, April 07, 2025, 09:17 (7 days ago) @ David Turell

The human brain

DAVID: A designer designs for future uses.

dhw: Add this to your statement “Much simpler with God as designer”, and you could hardly come up with a better argument for your God’s possible design of the autonomous mechanisms which have enabled cells to evolve into a vast variety of life forms, and have enabled brain cells in particular to complexify. (You have agreed that your God does NOT assert control or intervene when we humans think our complex thoughts and invent our complex machines.) One invention produces all the rest. Much simpler than the designer constantly having to perform new operations and issue new instructions every time there’s a change in the weather, not to mention his apparently having to design and cull 99 out of 100 species irrelevant to his one and only purpose.

DAVID: Back to second hand design, a wasteful way to proceed.

I’m pleased to see that you have now abandoned your theory that God gave the human brain its extra cells 3000 years ago because he had looked into his crystal ball and knew they would be needed thousands of years later. The wasteful way to proceed is yours, since you insist that he designed every species and had to cull 99% of them because they had no connection with the only species he wanted to design. Likewise,the evolution of the human brain would only be wasteful if you insist that your all-knowing, all-powerful God had to keep designing bigger and bigger brains in order to design the only brain he wanted to design. What you call “second-hand design” makes perfect sense if your God’s purpose was to create the free-for-all which you have accepted elsewhere as the dog-eat-dog reality of life’s history, along with the fact that by creating a free-for-all he was NOT responsible for the evil which causes so many problems for theologians who struggle to explain theodicy.

Cellular intelligence

DAVID: See today's entry on bacterial action with ameba's at a molecular level, no thought involved.

Bacterial immunity

DAVID: Where does the article show thought processing?

dhw: Where does it show your God’s instructions? Do you or do you not agree that the molecular activity described here must follow on from processing of information, communication and decision-making? Why do you assume that bacteria, which elsewhere in your posts have “freedom of action or free will”, can think for themselves when they kill us, but can’t do so when they kill an amoeba?

DAVID: The act of poisoning us or killing bacteria is all automatic.

And so although you agree that bacteria have freedom of will and action, they kill us or one another because they have no freedom of will or action. And since you also tell us that bacteria act in accordance with your God’s instructions, it is he who instructs them to murder us, although you doubt if he would instruct them to murder us. Perhaps one day you should read your own posts.

dhw: I presented a list of your other absurd self-contradictions, but since they have nearly all been repeated in these two posts, there’s not much point in going over them again here. You summed it all up when you described your beliefs as “schizophrenic” and admitted that you “first choose a God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.” What follows is sheer confusion.

DAVID: I am not confused about my God.

No, you are only confused about his purpose, methods and nature, which is why you keep contradicting yourself as well as ridiculing him with your various theories that reduce YOUR all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, all-controlling God to YOUR messy, cumbersome, inefficient and incompetent blunderer. (The adjectives are all yours, not mine.)