Cell response to electric field (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, April 18, 2013, 17:13 (4238 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I don't think that whales were pre-planned. The bush of life invented them. It is the inventiveness of DNA you keep ignoring. -The bush could not invent anything. The bush is the result of all the inventions. And if whales were not preprogrammed by your God, but DNA invented them, it is the "intelligence" of DNA you keep ignoring.-Let us review the situation. According to you, the cell/genome/DNA is an automaton: it has no consciousness/thought/intelligence of its own but can only react to its environment. The first forms of life handed down God's programme first to produce DNA and then thousands of millions of years later to produce bonobos and all the other organisms essential for the end product, which was humans. Other forms of life, such as flycatchers, brontosauruses and whales, were byproducts which the genome invented without preprogramming, and without having a clue what it was doing.-Questions:
1) If the genome invented whales without being preprogrammed, how do you know it didn't also invent bonobos without being preprogrammed?
2) If God's preprogramming of bonobos depended on unpredictable changes in the environment, is it not true to say that the evolution of the human bush depended on chance?
3) Bearing in mind that Darwin's theory allows for your God creating the first forms of life and the mechanisms for evolution, and if you believe that unpreprogrammed, unconscious, unintelligent DNA could invent all the complex innovations necessary to create flycatchers, whales and brontosauruses, why can't you believe that random mutations could do the same thing? (I find both hypotheses and the three-billion-year preprogramming of bonobos equally incredible.)
4) If an unpreprogrammed organism perceives, responds, solves problems, calculates what it is capable of doing in a given environment, and then invents something totally new and functional, what else would it need for you to acknowledge its "intelligence"?
5) You say: "consciousness is part of the universal consciousness and all of it is at the quantum level, behind the wall of uncertainty. All at an energy level, no material parts." So how do you know that the consciousness of the human 'soul' exists but the consciousness of the genome does not?-DAVID: I only work with what I see and try to apply some underlying structure to it.-So do we all. And there are many other possible structures, including at least three alternative theistic ones I offered you last time. Why do you cling to the least coherent of them all? Why leap so decisively into such quicksands of illogic when you can sit safely on the fence with me and contemplate other options with calm and rational detachment?