Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, November 29, 2018, 10:18 (1975 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: So Darwin is not totally dead, since you accept his theory of common descent as opposed to separate creation. But you believe your God guided the process.

David: Dead as a door nail. God made each step as a modification of the previous forms.
Followed by:
Darwin's 'common descent' is 'descent with modification'. In my view God is the modifier at each new stage and therefore we see descent with modification.

Darwin sees common descent as “descent with modification”, and you see common descent as “descent with modification”, and therefore Darwin’s common descent as “descent with modification” is as dead as a doornail. Alice would be proud of you.

DAVID: It is possible God experimented on the way. Religions claim God is totally omniscient but I have no proof of that, so experimentation is a consideration.

dhw: Now we’re talking. We must allow for the very human possibility that either your God doesn’t know what he wants, or knows what he wants but doesn’t know how to get it. (He is not omniscient.) There is no proof either that your God is in total control, or WANTS to be in total control, or created all the varieties of life as steppingstones to humans, or has no characteristics in common with the creature he created in his own image. It is all conjecture. But if experimentation is a possible consideration, so too is the unproven hypothesis that he created life because as first cause he was all alone and wanted something to occupy his sourceless, eternal, immaterial mind. If he can be ignorant, he can also be in need of something to do in the course of eternity.

DAVID: Now in your very imaginative mind you have created a mindless, purposeless lonely God wandering around wondering what to do, and probably wondering what caused Him to be there at all and certainly why He existed. Yet you can't explain the design in life you recognize.

Not mindless – if he exists he IS a mind! Not purposeless, because he gives himself a purpose. Lonely? Why not? Even you, when challenged on the subject of his purpose, speculated that he wants a relationship with us. Why would he want that? What on earth or in heaven that has to do with design I don’t know. We are talking about your God’s purpose for designing life, so now you scurry back to design itself as if that was an issue between us.
The article does raise an interesting question, though, which I’m sure you’d prefer to talk about:
https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/mechanosensing-and-mechanotransduction-h...

QUOTES: How that integration is achieved by each specific cell is still not understood. Indeed a lot of the essential aspects of all these issues are still poorly understood.
[…] Whatever the mechanisms that we still don’t understand, it is rather clear that coordinated cell migration and axon growth require not only the amazing structures and integration abilities in each individual cell, but also the cooperation of many different actors: the migrating cell, the ECM, guiding proteins and ligands, intermediate cells, the final target, and probably many other components."

Yes indeed, each individual cell has amazing abilities, and cells cooperate to make bodies function. One might almost be inclined to believe in cellular intelligence. Indeed, some scientists do.

But now perhaps you’ll tell me why a God who is capable of not knowing what he wants, or of knowing what he wants but having trouble working out how to get it, is incapable of wanting something to keep himself occupied.