Design not divine? (Origins)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 25, 2012, 17:47 (4440 days ago)

DAVID (under The bacterial flagellum): Primary flagship for intelligent design. A fair number of the proteins involved are not homologous from predecessors. Several individual knockouts remove function. Irreducible complexity?-http://www.scribd.com/doc/106728402/The-Bacterial-Flagellum-Adds up to requiring a number of successive lucky mutations or intelligent design. Any comments?-DAVID (under Review: Mind and Cosmos): Mind and Cosmos Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel, Oxford Press, 2012.-This is one weird book. An atheist philosopher claims that mind and consciousness cannot be explained by Neo-Darwinism. He proposes a natural teleological mechanism yet to be discovered. He admits that choosing a universal intelligence is a logical choice, but his atheism does not permit him to do that. To paraphrase: Hopefully a natural teleology can be found to be present in the order of things.-I've put these two posts together, because between them they seem to me to encapsulate the whole argument. The flagellum, just like the brain, and just like mind and consciousness, presents us with what seems to me to be incontrovertible evidence of intelligent design, but that does not provide us with incontrovertible evidence of a divine designer. Over and over again we are confronted by the fact that cells act inventively and cooperatively to create new organs and new organisms. That is the whole basis of evolution (with natural selection deciding which of these innovations survive), and for me it knocks on the head the now seemingly absurd idea of random mutations as the driving force of innovation. Mutations, yes, but random, no. As the environment changed throughout history, the cells adapted and innovated ... i.e. not only in order to survive (= adaptation), but also in order to test new possibilities (= innovation).-I haven't read Nagel's book, but the idea of a "natural teleology" fits in perfectly with the above scenario. It's the living cell that provides the intelligence underlying evolution. And what confronts all of us then is the question of how this hugely complex, intelligent, inventive mechanism arose in the first place. -This is where faith alone can provide an answer. Either the mechanism came about through an unbelievable and inconceivable sequence of coincidences, or there is a conscious intra- (perhaps also extra-) universal intelligence infinitely greater than our own, whose existence is totally inexplicable and for me also inconceivable.
 
As regards the cosmos, we know that our universe formulated conditions suitable for life on Earth. That's all we know. Same problem as above.-If you have enough faith to believe in a self-generated universal intelligence able to create macrocosms and microcosms, you can also have enough faith to believe in a self-generated set of conditions and a self-generated cellular intelligence. Alternatively, you can join me on the fence of the faithless.