Different in degree or kind (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, November 18, 2013, 20:27 (4023 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: If by "information in DNA" you mean all the factors that allow for reproduction and heredity and for maintenance of cells and cell communities, your question is tantamount to asking what is the origin of life. Do you really expect me to answer that? 
DAVID: Yes, because St. Thomas did it in a very logical way. He logically took that concept of the information the universe and life use back to a source. Information must have a source, or it somehow agglomerated by chance into a library of some sort, available to construct the universe and allow for life.-First cause. See my reponse under "Intelligence..."-dhw; You have missed the point. If ants are automatons, they can only obey instructions. If they make errors it can only be because they were given the wrong instructions or they had the freedom to make their own decisions. Automatons do not make their own decisions. Therefore the errors must also have been preprogrammed, which even you will surely admit is a bit daft.-DAVID: Not daft. Again I am trying to balance how much God dabbles against full pre-programming. If some ants from an available list of two or three responses to stimuli make an inappropriate fatal choice, those ants taking those choices disappear from evoluiton and the existing ants have refined survival choices. This is pure Darwinian thinking applied to theistic evolution. If Chuck could do it, why can't I?-So everything formic is either preprogrammed or divinely dabbled. Let's confine ourselves to ants, then, and forget about the other billions of species and all their problems. There are believed to be about 20,000 species of ant, which live in all kinds of environments, in all kinds of nests, in tiny colonies, in vast colonies, all presumably facing a variety of problems. According to you, God preprogrammed the first living cells with plans for each of these 20,000 species to evolve, and to cope with every different environment and every kind of problem. But not only did he preprogramme every response to every eventuality ... he even programmed two or three choices of response! And what's more, because ants are automatons, they don't even have the wherewithal to make a choice. It just sort of happens. And the ones which just sort of happen to make the wrong choice die. If he didn't preprogramme all the species and all the means of coping with all the different environments and all the different problems, and coming up with one out of all the different choices, he actually intervened personally. You can almost hear Chuck chuckling.