Origin of Life: Organic chemists don't know how (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, October 17, 2014, 18:51 (3476 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: We have been over this before, when I listed the possible reasons for there being no fossil record to explain the jump. Still with my theist hat on, if God was clever enough to preprogramme the Cambrian jump into the first cells of 3.7 billion years ago, why do you insist that he can't have been clever enough to invent a mechanism that would work out its own way to cope with or exploit the new conditions?-We have been over this before. A totally autonomous IM cannot possibly have the planning capacity for the Cambrian gap, unless given guidelines to follow. Of course God's capacity for planning can do it, or if He invented an IM, He gave it planning guidelines to follow, making it semi-autonomous.-> 
> dhw: We are dealing with hypotheses that explain how evolution might work. ..... If your God invented the inventive mechanism, then of course he invented life. Our subject here is whether evolution has a purpose, and whether the mechanism is autonomous (a very clear concept) or “semi-autonomous”, which is just about as fluffy as it gets!-I view yours as just as fluffy. The Cambrian gap requires huge amounts of information developed in the genome to plan those changes in new organ development. The information neccessary to jump the gap has to be pre-implanted or inserted as the gap is jumped. (That is, pre-programmed of dabbled) I'm trying to escape those by imagining a semi-autonomous IM, as described. In my mind it would work.
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> TONY: I am not certain how you two view 2), 3) and 4) as mutually exclusive. If I were going to do 2) I would certainly use 4) to do it. When I was done, I might even go back and use 3) to tweak and fine tune some things, or if necessary, to intervene at key moments to make sure things went the way I wanted them to.
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> dhw: The idea that really interests me, though, is that of God making sure things went the way he wanted them to. This was the tantalising point at which you left us last time, on the “Evolution v Creationism” thread. You said there: 
> “I never claimed that everything was created towards the purpose of creating humans. Humanity was created for a purpose, that of being stewards of the Earth. Everything else also has a purpose. Most of the time it is simply maintaining homeostasis [...] but other times it is as an active participant in the development of the world. Humanity was seen as the crowning achievement, not the end goal.”-Tony's view is correct. that is why I use the term semi-autonomous. God knows what the end points are. 
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> dhw: David, who insists that humanity is the end goal, asked where your view is stated in the bible. I asked what you meant by “the development of the world” (which fits in beautifully with my whole concept of an autonomous inventive mechanism endlessly creating new forms), and what you thought really was God's “end goal".-As the stewards of the Earth we are that goal.