horizontal gene transfer: the real IM? (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, December 21, 2014, 13:22 (3412 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Sunday, December 21, 2014, 14:21

DAVID: ...you love to imagine what God might think [...] I never do that, since for me God just IS.
dhw: Amazingly for someone who claims never to imagine what God might think, you tell us that he preprogrammed all the innovations and complex lifestyles 3.7 billion years ago for the purpose of creating humans.... But we mustn't ask ourselves what he might have done before he created this universe.
DAVID: We can only know about God's probable intentions from the point where time began. There we have a degree of evidence. I'm glad you can think about the pre-time era. You do it either to get confused about issues or to keep your mind occupied. To me it makes no sense to go back there.-You claim never to imagine what God might think, and yet you know about his (probable) intentions! In order to explain our universe, you inevitably have to consider what preceded it, and you have come up with first cause conscious energy. Some atheists say it makes no sense to “go back there”, because there was nothing before the Big Bang. Why are you so frightened of even considering the possibility that this was not the first ever universe?-dhw: ...but you are only willing to explore one explanation of its origins, and when you are confronted with the sheer unimaginableness and totally unscientific nature of that explanation, your response is: “One must jump the chasm to faith.”-DAVID: That is why is described as a chasm.-And yet you claim that science IS finding God, and that there is no other logical explanation, although you know yourself that this hypothesis is as unimaginable and as unscientific as any other.-DAVID: But semi-autonomous fits my concept of theistic evolution. You see my mind works authoritatively. You are the fuzzy one, with options in every possible direction.
dhw: Yes, I see different options. My "fuzziness" is due to the fact that I do not have a fixed concept to which I can try to fit the evidence. I look at the evidence and try to find concepts that fit. Alas, so far none of them do.
DAVID: You still have it bass-ackwards. The evidence strongly points to a planning consciousness.-That is the subject of our ongoing discussions. But the particular reference here was to the autonomy of the IM, and that actually allows for a planning consciousness. My point was that you have a fixed concept concerning theistic evolution (anthropocentric, preprogrammed 3.7 billion years ago) and refuse to acknowledge that evidence such as the higgledy-piggledy bush and research into cellular intelligence is open to a different interpretation.