Evidence for pattern development; mulling (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 03, 2014, 18:12 (3643 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What convergence really tells us is that basic patterns of response are present from the beginnings of life, so that very disparate, unrelated species can come up with the same answers as necessary. This implies controls as well as suggestions for innovation. -Why “really”? Convergence tells us that organisms come up with the same answers. Your preprogramming hypothesis is no more logical than the argument that the same problems will elicit the same solutions from intelligent beings, and it is the potential intelligence (the IM) that has been present from the beginnings of life.-dhw: How many programmes would your God have had to put into those first cells, allowing for every possible type of environment? With your new-found confidence, you have even decided to discount divine dabbling, which makes evolution totally reliant on programmes to be passed on from the very beginning. And since your God did not control the environment, these could have been wiped out at any moment by a catastrophe, 
DAVID: Your concept of MY God requires that his powers are limited. That is because you cannot accept the idea that He might exist. You have no right to question my concept of His abilities with your wishes. -I have challenged your interpretation of his purpose, not his powers, though limited powers are one possible explanation of the evolutionary bush. Creating an autonomous inventive mechanism, perhaps to relieve boredom, places no restriction on his powers. Nor does dabbling when he feels like it. I do accept the idea that God MIGHT exist (I'm an agnostic, not an atheist), and my concept of the inventive mechanism allows for his existence. The issue between us here is not the existence of God or the range of his abilities, but the possible autonomy of the IM, which seems to me a simpler and more convincing explanation of the higgledy-piggledy bush than your God preprogramming the first cells with every innovation and complex lifestyle from bacteria to humans.
 
DAVID: And I don't know where you got the idea that God, as I view Him, has no environmental control at all. I just don't know how much He does or does not have-Then it's you who are limiting his powers. However, under DILEMMAS, on 16 November at 15.02, I wrote: “I forgot to mention that he would have had to preprogramme every environmental change as well.” You responded at 21.38: “[...] I think the environment and the evolution of the universe follows physical principles, and God doesn't need to intervene. Chicxulub speeded up the appearance of mammals as dominant, but that would have eventually occurred anyway, just later.” Since then I have repeatedly pointed out that he was therefore relying on luck to produce the right conditions or not to obliterate his programme-carrying cells. For instance, on 22 November at 01.27: “...and you think he left that life at the mercy of chance. Well, if he could leave the environment to luck, to see what might happen, maybe he left the inventive mechanism to its own devices as well.” You replied: ”Or enough information is implanted from the beginning in the IM so it can handle the adaptations.” No contradiction from you there, but now suddenly God's control of the environment has become a matter of degree. So if he is in partial control, are you saying Chixculub was an accident or an intervention? My point is that if humans were preprogrammed, he would also have had to preprogramme all environmental changes (to get the right environment and to prevent catastrophe), or to dabble, or to rely on luck, all of which hypotheses you now seem to reject.
 
dhw: Whereabouts in the scientific literature have you found support for this hypothesis? At least my own has the scientific backing of specialists who emphasize the intelligence and cooperativeness of cells, and it still allows for your God to be the source of the inventive mechanism.
DAVID: I find support in the ID literature, and they do have peer-reviewed papers in the literature. [...] You keep throwing scientists' names at me as if they absolutely had the truth and nothing but the truth. They don't. They have opinions, nothing more. [...] Frankly using their quotes, which I have generally supplied for you, proves nothing. I am content with my own interpretations of their work.-It would be interesting to know which ID-ers actually posit your theory that the genome contains 3.7-billion-year-old programmes for every single innovation and complex lifestyle. I throw names at you because if experts in the field conclude that cells are sentient, cognitive beings, I see no reason to assert, as you keep doing, that the IM is capable only of minor modifications and not of invention, which can only occur through God's pregiven instructions. On the other thread, you wrote: “To be precise: an epigenetic IM exists, its limits for invention are unknown.” That far more conciliatory statement is the basis of my plea for open-mindedness.