Biological complexity: how the cell proteasome works (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 07, 2017, 13:26 (2757 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: At least you admit there has to be a 'force' to supply the intelligence. That is a beginning of what that force might be. Is it in and of itself intelligent? Does it supply raw undeveloped intelligence as in an infant? Can it plan?

dhw: Yes, these are the questions we ask and can never answer. Under “Genome complexity” you wrote that “all forms are descended from earlier forms by a totally unknown process”, and the same can be said of whatever force brought life into existence: it is totally unknown. That is why we continue to ask questions and examine the different answers to see whether they make sense or not. To a certain extent, all of them do, which is why different people adhere to different hypotheses. But eventually all of them reach a dead end where they cease to make sense.

DAVID: This is where the design argument steps in. The biology of the living cell is too complex for anything but design to be the source of the result. The interdigitation of all the interlocking organelles each doing their own thing yet cooperating with the other parts requires design, and a designer. I see no way around this argument. We can argue who is the designer, but not the necessity for design.

Why “who”? You are immediately jumping to the conclusion that the source of the design is an individual conscious “person”. You may be right, but this assumption raises innumerable and unanswerable questions about the source, composition, nature and intentions of such a “person”, which means you are simply trying to solve one mystery (the origin of life) by creating another. That is the “dead end” I mentioned above. Chance is a far simpler solution, as it does not create any mysteries about identity, but the belief that such complexity can be the result of sheer luck places an intolerable burden on one’s credulity – another dead end. My panpsychist compromise, in which individual materials possess a rudimentary intelligence and gradually complexify through interaction with other rudimentary intelligences (bottom up evolution) avoids the problems of theistic identity but again requires too great a degree of credulity for me to take the leap of faith. And so, as always, we are left with inadequate hypotheses that lead to the dead end of the totally unknown and perhaps unknowable.