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

by David Turell , Saturday, June 07, 2025, 17:26 (7 hours, 39 minutes ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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!

dhw: 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.

The attributes of your God needing a free-for-all for entertainment and his need to experiment are the humanizing aspects of your God, not like my God's possibilities.

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.

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

Our brain is my evidence.

Animal intelligence: the opossum

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

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....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?

Each minor aspect of any ecosystem is not critical for human survival.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance

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.

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

Teamwork!!! Survival on your own requires that in singles, but not in teams of cells.

Atheism

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

dhw: 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!

I am using the accepted conceptual form of the Biblical God. And you?