An inventive mechanism: role of horizontal gene transfer (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, December 04, 2014, 17:49 (3425 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The great question is the degree of its autonomy. [...] The limits for invention are unknown, so how can you as a scientist champion one theistic hypothesis and reject the other, [...] believing that your dilemma has been solved when this directly relevant and enormously important area of research remains so incomplete?-DAVID: My response is simple as previously stated. How do you know the limits of God's ability to program in the beginning? I don't. Early life was complex to begin with. My dabbling problem has to do exactly with my estimate of his powers. -Not only do we not know the limits of God's powers, but also we do not know the limits of the IM, we do not know the reason why God (if he exists) created life in the first place - though we have both offered the hypothesis that he was bored - and we do not know how evolution was able to advance from single cell to the vast array of animals that include ourselves. Out of this great area of non-knowledge you extrapolate the conclusion that the inventive mechanism can't invent anything, that God's intention from the very beginning was to create humans, and that he preprogrammed every innovation from bacteria to humans from the start, right down to the monarch butterfly's itinerary (though it's not clear what that has to do with humans). I don't find this simple at all.-DAVID: Could He do it all from the first or did He have to dabble? With our discussion of an IM as a definite possibility and the Tony's step-wise pattern programming, I am of the opinion that God more than likely did it from the beginning with rare intervention, thereafter. If He was extremely purposeful evolution might have been more direct than it was to arrive at us. Therefore, that any intervention was minimal seems reasonable to me.-“Extremely purposeful” is a lovely expression. What does it mean? If God had really, really, really wanted to, he could have created humans more directly, but he only sort of wanted to? So maybe bits of the bush weren't planned? Maybe the IM sometimes did its own thing instead of obeying instructions? Careful - that means autonomy. “Rare intervention” and “any intervention was minimal” is a subtle step away from your statement (under DILEMMAS, 22 November at 01:16): “I'm accepting the idea that God doesn't have to dabble.” So now we have some dabbling after all. How minimal is minimal? Making a human brain, perhaps, since you insist that we are different in kind? Would that be minimal? The problem of environmental change remains unresolved - preprogrammed or left to chance? A suitable environment is not exactly irrelevant to the existence of humans, is it? (See more on the “mulling” thread.) No, I see nothing simple about your response. Simplistic might be a better term.