Innovation; Just for dhw (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 19, 2015, 12:02 (3062 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: We share the concept of a built-in drive for improvement and complexity, but what you call ”God-given information supplied at the origin of life” is what I have suggested is AUTONOMOUS INTELLIGENCE, whereas you have suggested that it is divine preprogramming or personal intervention.
DAVID: You have never explained how 'autonomous intelligence' develops, if my memory is correct. As life began from inorganic matter, you want intelligence to arise also?-Nobody knows how any form of intelligence developed, but I am an agnostic, and have repeated a thousand times that your God may have invented the mechanism. The dispute is over how evolution works, and my hypothesis is an alternative to your divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme to explain every innovation from the year dot. -Dhw: ...you refuse to contemplate the possibility that your God might have created it! For you, every single act of cellular intelligence must have been preprogrammed (or personally “guided”) by your God, as in this response:-DAVID: Simple God programmed in the kind of information/instructions that handle it.
dhw: A simple 3.8-billion-year-old programme inserted into the first cells to organize the history of evolution from bacteria to humans? Is that really simpler than a single invention that can diversify?
DAVID: I guess you cannot accept God because you are incredulous at what I believe He can do. Is that your hang-up?-I am incredulous at the fact that you do not believe your God could invent an autonomous intelligence allowing organisms to make their own evolutionary decisions, rather than him planning every one, though his aim was just to produce humans. Perhaps you cannot even contemplate this hypothesis because it would undermine your personal reading of your God's mind and purpose. “Is that your hang-up?”