Immunity system complexity: how T cells are triggered (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, April 14, 2019, 15:26 (1833 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You were suggesting that my hypothesis is invalid because nobody has found the material source of cellular intelligence. Nobody has found your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for all bacterial actions (plus the whole of evolution). If my proposal is out, so is yours. Your alternative appears to be that your dabbling God is always on the spot, permanently doing all the thinking for every individual bacterium in every individual situation from the beginning until the end of time. Doesn't that stretch even your credulity?

DAVID: God does not have to be at the beck and call of each bacterium, if He simply implanted intelligent instructions for proper responses to stimuli in the genome.

dhw: Your “intelligent instructions” would be your 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every single new action. The alternative would be for him to pop in with new instructions whenever new conditions arose. Nobody has yet discovered the computer programme, and popping in is your dabbling. What would he dabble with if not the genome of each bacterium? Or does dabbling mean him saying “All change, everybody!" and suddenly every bacterium’s genome automatically makes the necessary adjustments?

DAVID: We both can only propose and guess, me from my automaticity viewpoint and you from a mysterious intelligence that somehow popped up from nowhere.

dhw: You are refusing to consider the implications of your two methods of creating automaticity: your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or personal dabbling (as described above) for every single bacterial action throughout life’s history. This stretches my credulity way beyond its limits. The source of my “mysterious” and still hypothetical cellular intelligence is unknown, and so I have always allowed for it to be your God, who himself is a mysterious intelligence that somehow popped up from nowhere or, even more mysteriously, has simply been there for ever and ever.

I find your credulity very limited: you don't trust chance to achieve our reality and recognize the importance of design, but then deny the need for a designer! The only choices are chance or design. Since you cannot find a third way, you then sweetly refer to 'my God' to make yourself appear neutral in our discussions. It is patently obvious that 'mind' is required to explain this reality. The chasm awaits!