The Intelligent Cell (Origins)

by dhw, Monday, December 19, 2011, 11:43 (4504 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: Do you really believe that every single environmental change and every single species extinction was planned by God as an essential step to the creation of humans?

DAVID: Not at all. The Earth is an evolved and evolving planet. It is in a hostile universe, and its solar system has asteroids that are still available for making trouble. Ask the recently departed dinosaurs. Then locally (in time and place) are tsunamis, tornados, earthquakes and other killers, all necessary for the evolution process of Earth.
With that as the physical evolutionary force set up in the beginning, I believe God arranged for the genome to have remarkable responsiveness for adaptation to physical disasters, and at the same time a diversity of life forms. Chixulub nailed the dinos, but the little mammals survived because of this pre-planning.

Ah, we’re moving closer. In this scenario, if I’ve understood you correctly, your God did not preplan the route to humans, but ensured that life would go on, and that species would diversify no matter what natural, unplanned disasters might strike. In other words, he planned randomness (the unpredictable environment) and created a mechanism that would enable some species to adapt and survive while others would perish. But since he did not plan each individual environmental change, he could hardly have planned which species did what, or when they did it.

DAVID: Does God intervene? Not much if at all.

If he did intervene, in what way do you think he might have done so? If it was Chicxulub that did for the dinosaurs (this still seems to be controversial), might that have been God’s way of removing “unnecessary” species, or did he perhaps see a likely looking bonobo and think: “I can do something different with this”? My question is serious. Without intervention, it seems to me that God was leaving an awful lot to chance if you still cling to the anthropocentric theory you’ve inherited from some of the established religions. (I can be naughty too!) How much simpler it would be to attribute diversity to the responses of intelligent cells to different environmental challenges. I go back to my extremely respectable – because it has an official name – theory of punctuated isolation equilibrium. What we have is exactly the same process as with other developments: environmental change, need to adapt, possible innovations, continued refinement. In this case, the chimpobos lose their tree habitat, come down to earth, exercise their brains to work out a new way of life, and gradually lose their chimpiness (or boboness) as their brains develop and their bodies adapt. Then you don’t need intervention, you don’t need pre-planning (other than the original mechanism for diverse forms of adaptation), you don’t need to explain the history of extinctions, and you don’t need to bother about God’s special focus on, interest in, purpose for Man. Then, David, you can say you believe in a UI without attributes!