Natures wonders: how plants became carnivores (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, February 12, 2017, 09:15 (2623 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your panpsychist third way is consciousness without God's consciousness. You've just offered a subset of the God hypothesis, that is all. Why not call that type of consciousness God?

I suspected that this would provide a nice diversion for you from the subject of the autonomous inventive mechanism, which you can’t even bring yourself to mention now! No, the panpsychist type of consciousness I have described is totally different from that of your God. Firstly, it is multiple, and secondly, as I explained in the part of my post you have omitted, it begins at a rudimentary level and evolves with time and experience. Your single God works top downwards, and my multiple panpsychist consciousnesses work bottom upwards, and as we have no idea how they might have developed their rudimentary consciousness, they are closer to chance than to God. But as I said, in my view this hypothesis is just as likely/unlikely as the other two.

DAVID: Whatever the first cause is, humans are here. Principle: God guided evolution to produce humans. Under that umbrella, all of your above thoughts are possible. We've settled it.

Sorry, but far from settled. Our starting point on this thread was carnivorous plants and frogs’ tongues, and I really cannot understand why your God would specially design such things in order to keep life going so that humans could arrive. They seem to me to be ideal examples of how your God’s autonomous inventive mechanism would carry on producing wonder after wonder without his interference and without any link to the production of humans. This would give us a clear explanation for the higgledy-piggledy history of evolution, and you can still have your God stepping in to produce humans. So for the fourth time, would you not agree that these two examples are far more likely to be the product of the cell communities’ God-given autonomous intelligence (the possible existence of which you have agreed to) than the product of his 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or his direct dabbling?