Explaining natural wonders: bacterial intelligence (Animals)

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 07, 2017, 18:25 (2512 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I still think accidental fits. It gets back to my view of theodicy. Evil disease exists when bacteria and viruses end up in the wrong places, just as evil people with free will and a dangerous universe exist. Part of an evolving reality. But God gave us a big brain and the challenge to solve the problems and we are doing a good job. We learn to kill bacteria. We track asteroids. We have ethical (sort of) societies to handle evil people.

dhw: Whether we are doing a good job or not is open to debate, and you’ve still got your God preprogramming some bacteria to resist countermeasures against their accidental attempted murders, but I have no objections to this theistic answer, which fits in with reality as we know it. It shows that your God has no problem giving up control, even to the point that he is willing to leave Nature to do its own thing: bacteria to cause diseases, the dangerous universe to destroy life willy-nilly. If millions of humans die in an ice age or because of a plague or because a comet crashes into the earth, so be it. He gave us a big brain, so it’s up to us to solve the problems he has created through a system of “accidents”. Of course, we shouldn’t ask what might have been his purpose in setting it all up, because that would mean trying to read his mind. And yet you cannot countenance the possibility that he might also have set up a system whereby organisms designed their own lifestyles and natural wonders. Let bacteria, ice ages and asteroids do their worst, but in the meantime he must personally design the weaverbird’s nest and teach the monarch the tricks of migration and prepare the pre-whale to enter the water. Only this section of “evolving reality” demands his total control. Purpose? Well, apparently without the nest, the migration and the blowhole, life could not have gone on long enough for him to produce humans, which was his sole purpose apart from other purposes you can’t think of. Don't you find all this a bit disjointed?

Not at all disjointed. We've been over all of this. He doesn't control every movement of every bacteria. They take care of themselves very well. They accidently get into our lungs or urine and cause trouble. We know how to solve that now with our big brains. His disjointed use of evolving life? No way. That was his choice. And the balance of nature provides the energy for evolution to last long enough to reach the H. sapiens form. Makes perfect sense to me once you accept humans are the goal from the start of the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago. He either cannot or would not do a six day job, called for by the gross misinterpretation of Genesis in old Hebrew.