New Miscellany 1: evolution, insects, intelligence (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 20, 2025, 13:32 (10 hours, 19 minutes ago) @ David Turell

The smelly hoatzin

DAVID: Your absurd complaint about God's use of evolution has exhausted its usefulness for discussion and is not worth any response. Your usual retreat into thousands or millions of years tells us nothing concrete. We can only know the present: no new evolution of new species.

dhw: I have not complained about your God’s use of evolution. I have complained about your absurd theory, which ridicules both his inefficiency and our language, in which inefficiency denotes a strange form of efficiency. It is also you who insist that evolution is finished (bolded above), which proves that your God’s one and only purpose was to design us and our food. Now you admit that we have no idea what the future holds, in which case you have demolished your own “proof” that we and our food were your God’s sole purpose in creating life.

DAVID: My thoughts about the past are based on real facts and are not negated by guesses about the future.

The only “real facts” are that there is life on Earth, it began with simple forms, and gradually more complex forms emerged, including humans, who are the latest species. It is not a “real fact” that there is a God, that if there is a God, his sole purpose was to design humans plus food, that he directly designed every single species, that he had to cull 99.9% of them because they were irrelevant to that purpose, and that he is a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer. Nor is it a fact that a billion years from now there will be no new species, which will prove that your non-factual God’s non-factual purpose was us and our food. Please stop pretending that your illogical theory of evolution is based on facts.

Animal minds: Insect tool use

DAVID: Yes, ants which may be a special case.

dhw: So ants prove that insects are intelligent. Last Thursday you wrote: “It is my stated position above that I accepted insect intelligence”, but on Friday you wanted to test for it, and now you no longer accept insect intelligence, and ants may be a special case.

DAVID: Testing the insects proves the point.

Of course. And on Thursday you accepted insect intelligence, but on Friday you did not.
Which is it this week?

Mind and cosmos leading to cellular intelligence

dhw: You have totally ignored this whole section of my post, which is a response to your dismissal of the theory of cellular intelligence immediately after your acceptance of it.

And you continue to do so.

dhw: But you attribute all the changes to your God’s preprogramming or intervention, with the 99.9% death rate the result of his inefficiency, made all the more damaging to his image by the fact that he designed them while knowing they were irrelevant to his purpose.

DAVID: Reiterating your usual mantra as above. All evolutions have loss of forms as part of the natural culling process. You must have forgotten this point.

dhw: We only know of one evolution of life on Earth, and you have forgotten that according to you, there was no “natural culling process” because a) your God is/was in total control of it, b) his sole purpose was to design us plus food, and c) he designed and had to cull the 99.9%, which is why d) you ridicule his inefficiency. When will you stop dodging?

DAVID: Stop it. There are many evolutionary processes we can study. All show culling. You keep trying to sell your nutty distorted view of God's evolution of humans.

We do not know of any other evolutionary process that entails a hypothetical, omnipotent, omniscient, sourceless mind designing living cells that not only reproduce themselves but can also evolve into ever more complex communities (= organs and organisms). I am not trying to sell any view when I point out that your own view of this being ridicules him as messy, cumbersome and inefficient because according to you he deliberately creates and then culls 99.9 out of 100 species that have no connection with the purpose you impose on him, even though you believe this omnipotent, omniscient being to be perfectly capable of designing anything he wants “de novo”! Stop dodging.