More Denton: Reply to David (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, August 08, 2015, 07:33 (3395 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw:There is an interesting variation here. If God did “refine the programme” as he went along (another form of your “dabbling”), do you visualize him personally dipping into the innards of all the individual organisms concerned to change their programme, or sitting at some great console in the firmament, or doing it all by telekinesis? You must have SOME idea of how God might change the programme (or “dabble”).-DAVID: I have admitted over and over that I have no idea how God does it, and I am sure He is still active. We know the information is in DNA and its overlying control layers. We know evolution follows patterns established in the beginning of life. Therefore there must be an overall control program which God can tweak somehow. That is as far as I can go.-Or maybe that is as far as you are prepared to go. You do not hesitate to impose a purpose on your God - who you believe designed the universe in order to produce humans - and you do not hesitate to propose two methods of production: a 3.8-billion-year computer programme and/or direct intervention. That, you say, is “how he does it”. But the curiosity that has led you from your agnosticism to your panentheism somehow deserts you when it comes to the practicalities of your hypotheses. It's only when alternatives are proposed that you want to know details: e.g. the evidence and whereabouts of an inventive mechanism in the cell (though no-one has discovered the computer programme either), and how cellular intelligence could design complex organs (though you have no idea how God could insert or refine his programmes in millions of organisms). One law for the theist and another for the agnostic?