Life's biologic complexity: Automatic molecular actions (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 16, 2016, 12:30 (2899 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Perhaps I didn't make my point clear: that the changes would only have taken place once pre-whales had opted for life in the water, whereas you insist that the changes took place before they entered the water.

DAVID: The whale series has eight or nine forms, the first of which prepared them for the water. Later forms were fully aquatic. God's stepwise control.

Didn’t God know how to make a “proper” whale right from the start? Ditto a “proper” human? Why these “itty-bitty” steps (your favourite criticism of Darwinism)? Why so much trouble over trying to perfect the whale when all God wanted was humans? It puzzles you, but your puzzlement doesn’t make you doubt your reading of God’s mind.

DAVID: I recognize your honest attempt at being an agnostic, but I see your theological thinking as very biased when you try it on, but I don't see it as a fault, just uncertainty.
dhw: …I really don’t think you can blame my agnosticism for the flaws in your hypothesis.
DAVID: I don't see my puzzlement as a flaw. The whale series is a testament to God's inventiveness. I have to presume it is God's way of providing top predators for a balance of nature in the oceans.

Everything is a testament to God’s inventiveness, if he exists. The flaw is not your puzzlement. The flaw is what makes you puzzled. You can’t understand the vast variety of life forms extinct and extant if God’s aim was simply to produce humans. So maybe his aim was not simply to produce humans. Maybe his aim was to allow his initial mechanism to produce a vast variety of life forms, and pre-whales worked out their own step-by-step improvements. Humans may have been an afterthought. Or maybe he just kept experimenting in the hope of coming up with a fully conscious mind like his own (just as our robot-makers are trying to do). We can only search for an explanation of what we believe to be the facts. If a theory doesn’t seem to fit them, it has to be suspect.