Genome complexity: new review of epigenetics studies (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, May 08, 2017, 13:41 (2756 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Of course speciation is entirely unknown as a process. We all make judgments as to how it might proceed. Darwin's method of tiny progressive chance changes is obviously false. To make major body plan changes requires a complex plan before the changes can occur. Only a planning mind can do this. I've not changed my mind that it must be God.
dhw: My point here is that since the process is totally unknown, and nobody has ever observed speciation, you should not reject the hypothesis of a perhaps God-given AUTONOMOUS inventive mechanism (i.e. intelligence operating without divine “guidance”), as you keep doing, on the grounds that the mechanism has not been found. Your 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme has not been found, and nobody has ever seen your God dabbling.
DAVID: I feel you are talking around my argument but never addressing it. The complexity of living matter was not discussed in the above comment by you. I constantly present new studies into the complexity, and you generally ignore them. The key to my argument is COMPLEXITY. It cannot occur by chance. It requires planning, which means it occurs from mentation.

I have ALWAYS accepted and acknowledged the complexity argument against chance. Even in the “brief guide” I included among the design arguments “the hugely complex nature of all the organs that we know of” (the others being origins, heredity and adaptability). I did so again as recently as 4 May at 12.12 under “Biological complexity”. You wrote: “It is more than reasonable to conclude that only design by a planning mind is the source of the beginning of life.” I replied: “Perfectly reasonable. And alongside a variety of psychic experiences, the complexity of the cell is the major reason why I cannot embrace atheism.”

DAVID: […] How God manages evolution is just guess work on my part and on your part. It fills much of our discussions, but it is totally beside the point. One must address the complexity of the living mechanisms, and it's source cannot be bottom up.

You are yet again conflating two separate issues. One is the existence of your God, and I have repeatedly explained why I cannot reject or accept the God hypothesis. The second issue is IF God does exist, what might be his purpose, his methods and his nature? These are not “beside the point”. If God exists, they are a point in themselves, as you insist when constantly harping on about his purposefulness. My proposal that he may have given organisms the intelligence to do their own designing (with the option of an occasional dabble) seems to me at least as reasonable as your proposal that he preprogrammed or dabbled everything (including today’s Diplostomum pseudospathaceum and sexy orchid - thank you for two more amazing examples of Nature’s wonders) in order to keep life going until he could design the one thing he actually wanted to design (humans), which is the only hypothesis you have come up with.