More Denton: A new book (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 06, 2016, 21:28 (3213 days ago) @ BBella

David's comment: Who made the 'natural telic law'? And note, an agnostic at Discovery Institute.-dhw: ... However, talk of a “natural telic law” may gloss over the fact that if common descent is true, innovations can only take place within individual organisms. This means that whatever mechanism caused innovations HAS to be within the organisms themselves. If you believe in God AND evolution, either he interferes with individual organisms, or he has preprogrammed them, or he has given them a mechanism with which to organize their own innovations (and lifestyles and wonders).-DAVID: Those certainly are the three possibilities. I strongly question how an inventive mechanism arose de novo from the original single cells that started life, which is your primary theory.-I described five possibilities. The other two were random mutations (which we both reject) and an autonomous inventive mechanism, as above, that was not invented by your God. Nobody knows how ANY form of intelligence arose - including your “first cause” intelligence which created and is within and without all those billions of solar systems - and so, as BBella points out below, your objection applies to all hypotheses.
 
BBella: If we have to ask "who" gave the cell intelligence, then wouldn't we have to ask "who" gave God intelligence? Your answer would probably be, God has always had intelligence. Then couldn't one just as well say the cell has always had intelligence, or, in my mind, just as well say intelligence has always been, just as energy and matter has always been? Does intelligence absolutely require a beginning or a place of origin, one central location, as a first mind?-I agree completely with the implications of all your questions, and also with David's question. We do not know how or when intelligence arose, or whether it has always been present, but this does not affect hypotheses as to how evolution actually works. I myself have always tried, as Darwin did, to keep the two questions separate: how does evolution work? What is the origin of life and all its mechanisms? My evolutionary hypothesis therefore leaves open the question of how cells acquired their initial intelligence. Since Denton is an agnostic, I suspect he does the same, but I haven't read his book.