Biochemistry of cell communication; message molecules (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, February 22, 2018, 12:42 (2254 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I’m quite happy with the design argument. I don’t see how that means that God’s consciousness pervades the universe at all levels, and you and I are conscious, and your dog is conscious, and an ant is conscious, and bacteria seem to be conscious but you happen to know that they are robots.

DAVID: My comment that God pervades also includes that He designed intelligent responses in bacteria as well as my dog and ants are conscious.

Yes, I know. You think dogs and ants are conscious because they behave intelligently, but bacteria are robots although they behave intelligently.

dhw: This evolutionist here suggests that cells from the very beginning had the perhaps God-given potential to change their structure and to combine in an almost endless variety of forms and functions – a kind of autonomous inventive intelligence.

DAVID: If not God-given you have no explanation for the appearance of autonomous inventive intelligence which must operate with an understanding of the information it receives.

I have given you the alternative sources many times over, emphasizing that I find all of them equally difficult to believe. Hence my fence-sitting agnosticism. The possible sources are your God (a form of top-down panpsychism), chance, and bottom-up panpsychism (rudimentary consciousness evolving).
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dhw: For some reason the word “mutation” has come to be linked with the word “random”. Every change is a mutation, whether random or designed. Assuming the author doesn’t believe that every form of life existed from the very beginning, I cannot see any objection to the argument that the multitude of processes has come about through a multitude of mutations […]
DAVID: I did not reproduce the part of the article that showed the odds against multiple coordinated mutuations to produce a major change:

QUOTE: "Are there long, gradual, pathways of functional intermediate structures, separated by only one or perhaps a few mutations, leading to every single species, and every single design and structure in all of biology? As we saw last time, this has been a fundamental claim and expectation of evolutionary theory which is at odds with the science.* If one mutation is rare, a lot of mutations are astronomically rare. For instance, if a particular mutation has a one-in-a-hundred million (one in 10^8) chance of occurring in a new individual, then a hundred such particular mutations have a one in 10^800 chance of occurring. It’s not going to happen."

Exactly the same argument. If you believe in common descent, those mutations did happen (though as I pointed out before, not one at a time). You say your God preprogrammed or dabbled them. I propose that cellular intelligence organized them. Your author doesn’t seem to realize that he is NOT arguing against mutations but against chance. If, however, he rejects common descent, the alternative is the individual creation of every single species and variation from scratch, and I wonder what you and “the science”* say about that.