Immunity: detecting dangerous bacteria (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 19, 2017, 13:57 (2562 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The glossing is yours. You consistently maintain that cells cannot possibly think for themselves. Now you have them learning by experience and deliberately changing themselves. I’m delighted to see your change of heart.
I have ALWAYS left open the possibility that your God designed the autonomous intelligence of cells, and have repeated it here: “the option open that your God designed the designers.”

DAVID: Do I have to parse what I wrote? All I have stated is if God made cells totally automatic or gave them an ability to design, it is still God at work, with no other alternative source of creation. Do you have an alternative to God?

You wrote that the “immune system cells learn about bacteria by experience, changing its DNA to fit its discoveries”. If cells learn by experience and change their structure, they cannot be automatons, but until now that is what you have insisted they are. Your acknowledgement that cells learn from experience and act according to what they learn makes for a red-letter day in the history of the AgnosticWeb!

As for alternatives to your God, you know perfectly well that one is chance and one is the panpsychist hypothesis I have described over and over again (bottom up evolution), and you know that I find these hypotheses as difficult to believe in as the universal sourceless conscious mind you call God. And that is why I am an agnostic. (See also my response to the article on panpsychism)