Balance of nature illustrated (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 07, 2015, 19:27 (3360 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Of course the balance is always changing. This is planning for a balanced food supply at all times, not for survivorship. What survives is balance of food supply, period.
Dhw: You make it sound as if your God's purpose was to create a balanced food supply, regardless of what ate it! Balanced in whose interests? How do you define a balanced food supply if different organisms require different foods, and when there aren't enough worms for Dicky Bird, he disappears? -DAVID: Why not? Species do disappear.-That is my point. You keep telling us that God planned or dabbled all the innovations and lifestyles, 99% of which have disappeared. Now you tell us he planned a balanced food supply and not survival. So were all the extinctions an accident or planned? Has the food supply remained balanced when 99% of the eaters and the eaten have disappeared? (I don't know the percentage of plants.) Once again, a “balanced food supply” in whose interests?-DAVID: [...] very complex lifestyles point to a designer God, since it is extremely unlikely that the organisms, by themselves, could have created these complex ways of living. 
Dhw: Extremely unlikely, but possible - a description that fits all the hypotheses.
DAVID: “Extremely unlikely” suggests against all the odds, don't you think?-Yes, I do. And that applies to a know-all consciousness that's simply always been there as much as it does to a consciousness that evolved and to the miraculous creativity of chance.-DAVID: I try to reason why based on design because I don't believe chance can create these complex lives. Why do salmon go to sea for six years? I don't know. [...] I start with the premise that it is designed, because it looks designed, and for me I don't have to go any further. It simply fits.
Dhw: Interesting. Bacteria look intelligent, but you start with the premise that they are automatons! Which comes first - the premise or the observation?
DAVID: From observation.-The salmon's lifestyle looks designed, and therefore your premise is that it is designed. The bacterium's behaviour looks intelligent, and therefore your premise is that it is an automaton. Hm.-Dhw: Once more you revert to your attack on chance. I don't believe the salmon's voyage, the monarch's four-generation migratory lifestyle, the spider's silk, or the weaverbird's nest are the result of chance either. But instead of a 3.7billion-year-computer programme or separate dabbles, I offer an alternative: a form of autonomous inventive intelligence (possibly God-given), akin to though different from the autonomous intelligence you believe is possessed by us humans, who also do our own inventing. It may seem unlikely, but it simply fits.
DAVID: Kauffman does the same thinking. It avoids an agency such as God.-Why “avoids”? You make it sound as if God is the default position, and Kauffman is trying to wriggle out of it. Why should you automatically assume that a complicated bird's nest was not designed by the bird but by a vast mind that nobody knows anything about? (Continued under “Epigenetics”)