New Miscellany 1 & 2: evol, intelligence, humanizing etc. (General)

by dhw, Saturday, June 07, 2025, 08:50 (13 hours, 39 minutes ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: How can my theory be wrong? Making God the controller of a known historical process, evolution, troubles you when I assign a purpose.

You continue to focus on individual aspects of your theory, leaving out those which make it illogical and also insulting to your God. We both accept evolution as a known historical process. Assuming God exists, we also accept that he must have invented the process and have had a purpose. What you blatantly omit is your insistence that his sole purpose was to design us plus food, but he proceeded to design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us plus food, even though you also insist that he could design whatever species he wanted “de novo”. You can only explain these parts of your theory by telling us that your perfect, omniscient, omnipotent designer is a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer. Stop dodging!

DAVID: You jump to humanizing God as entertained by the process as a free-for-all or a set up for necessary experimentation. Your God is not as a know-it-all powerful entity, but a human as mirrored by your brain. Your God is you!

Your attack on my alternative theistic theories provides no defence of your own. Your “humanizing” objection has long been discredited by your agreement that your God may well have thought patterns and emotions like ours, and you yourself offer enjoyment, interest, desire for recognition and worship, possible love as examples. And why not? For creations to reflect aspects of their creator does not make their creator a human being – a silly exaggeration. Since this “humanization” is your only objection, discredited by yourself, you clearly can’t find fault with any of my alternatives.

dhw: (transferred from “human feet”): Why do you think he gave humans free will? Please answer.

DAVID: God: The conceptualization capacity of our brain needs free will to work at full capacity.

Back to your vague “concepts”. And why do you think your God wanted humans to have maximum “conceptualization capacity”? Please answer.

Animal intelligence: the opossum

DAVID: Way too much conceptualization for a opossum. Works in your brain.

dhw: Do you think this is less credible than God saying to himself: “I must teach opossums to play dead, because otherwise wolves might kill them and eat them, and I really need them to survive so that humans can kill them and eat them”?

DAVID: Same old. The opossum fits into a necessary ecosystem all of which support humans.

Every single organism in the current world as in the pre-human world has fitted into an ecosystem which was “necessary” for its survival. (99.9% of those in the past were irrelevant to your version of your God’s purpose.) You acknowledge that some animals, insects, birds, maritime creatures really are intelligent, so why do you think your God specially designed and taught the stupid opossum how to stop the wolf from eating it? Do you think he thinks the human world would collapse without stupid opossums?

Immunity system complexity

DAVID:[…] The interplay between innate and adaptive cells is fascinating and suggests a designer at work creating a very flexible response to all challenges. dhw will be pleased at the automatic intelligent interplay between the cell types.

In your language, “automatic” is the opposite of “intelligent”, but you like to play silly language games in order to cover up even the possibility that cellular communication and interplay in response to new threats provides evidence of intelligence, and not of unthinking obedience to 3.8-billion-year-old instructions or of your God popping in to perform a new twiddle.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance

QUOTE: "A community’s survival often depends on communication between individuals, enabling them to share strategies to overcome stress and threats. Bacteria are no different. To survive in the face of their main enemy—antibiotics—bacteria have developed unique communication systems."

dhw: Thereby confirming your own agreement that bacteria are intelligent. And so the evidence for Shapiro’s theory continues to accumulate.

DAVID: Yes, in bacteria only.

Why would your God give single cells autonomous intelligence but take it away when single cells form communities?

Atheism

DAVID: Your thinking is primarily atheistic as it comes across.

dhw: How can a theory which proposes that – as you agree - humans may have thought patterns and emotions like those of their creator be regarded as atheistic?

DAVID: That aspect does not. But you clearly dislike a God who works in designs for future use.

Even if that were true, it still wouldn’t make me an atheist! I have nothing at all against a God who designs for the future. For instance, the free-for-all theory is precisely geared to a design that will provide almost endless future varieties of species, ecosystems, lifestyles, strategies etc. Ditto a theory which entails future new discoveries and “concepts”, or even experimentation in order to achieve a future goal. What I do dislike, however, is any theory that makes no sense and is full of contradictions, e.g. by postulating a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient designer whose design is messy, cumbersome and inefficient. We have come full circle!