Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, October 13, 2016, 12:55 (2749 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The issue between us on this thread is your theory that God made the equipment and the organisms then learned how to use it. I offer the alternative: that under new conditions, organisms needed new equipment and (theistic version) God gave them the means to make it......It is the individual cell communities responding cooperatively and intelligently to the overall requirements of the organism.

DAVID: I will stick to my point, that single celled organisms do not have the planning capacity to become multicellular, and multicellular organisms do not have he planning capacity for the gaps we see in evolution.

That is the nub of the matter. I will stick to my point that we don’t know how much planning capacity they have. However, you wrote: “Yes they are built to act as if intelligent, but other than the editing of their DNA for adaptation without speciation they are automatic.” I pointed out that the non-automatic ability to edit DNA might enable multicellular organisms to create new structures, to which your response was the same as above. Subjective opinion dogmatically asserted as fact.

DAVID: I repeat, all we see is gaps around the few transitional forms in the fossil library. Your reliance on transitional forms suggests you are imagining a series of tiny step transitions. They don't exist! The gaps strongly imply saltation.

It is you who keep talking of tiny steps. But maybe there were. Maybe Tikki Jr had slightly more leggy legs than Tikki Sr. Who knows? Your own theory requires changes from fins to tikkilegs to fully formed legs. Do you believe your God preprogrammed/dabbled more transitional forms or a straight saltation? Whichever it is, I can hypothetically ascribe to my intelligent cells. Hypothetically, anything your God can do, his (theistic version) inventive mechanism can do. Once again, your assertion that cells/cell communities do not have the intelligence – though you could hardly argue that your God is incapable of inventing such a mechanism – is opinion, not fact.

DAVID: …bacteria have the ability to use alternative pathways if a primary pathway is no longer useful. All built in.
dhw: The ability to find the right solution out of countless possibilities is what I would call intelligence, and yes, it is built in.

DAVID: Yes, it looks like intelligence, but shifting from one pathway to another is the same as coming to a 'Y' on a walkway and trying to take preferred right not left, and choosing left because right is blocked. It is doing what you are able to do.

You make it sound as if the millions of problems bacteria have solved are a simple choice between right and left. You know as well as I do that they have mastered virtually every environment, solving nearly every survival problem thrown at them. Human beings have also mastered many environments. Do we do it automatically by walking left or right? Yes indeed, organisms do what they are able to do. That also applies to you and me, but it doesn’t make us automatons.

dhw: I agree that it is not easy to imagine. Nor is it easy to imagine your God stepping in and giving the false viper a lesson, or providing the first living cells with a programme for fake eye camouflage to pass down through billions of years to false vipers and butterflies once they have come into existence.
DAVID: You can't imagine God stepping in. I can. He bothered to start a universe with life.

That is not what I said. If he exists, then of course he stepped in. But I can’t imagine him stepping in to give false vipers and butterflies lessons in how to camouflage themselves. Nor, frankly, can I imagine that he believed the false viper’s eye camouflage essential to preserve the balance of nature to provide food to keep life going so that humans could appear.