Bacterial Intelligence? self ID virus that kills enemies (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 30, 2019, 12:32 (1821 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: There can be no doubt that a programme for every single undabbled innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder will be mind-bogglingly complex, and all you are saying now is that this mind-bogglingly complex programme will be discovered in the future.

DAVID: And my point is that degree of complexity will require an acceptance that God did it.

That is the design argument for the existence of God, which I accept as perfectly logical. It is your championship of a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for all undabbled evolutionary innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders that is in dispute.

DAVID: I view God as maintaining full control at all times.

dhw: I know you do, and that means an undiscovered, 3.8-billion-year-old programme for all undabbled developments, including bacterial behaviour for the rest of time, though you don’t actually believe in it.

DAVID: My belief system simply proposes how God might have exerted His controls.

But you admit that you do not actually believe in this undiscovered programme. Good. That leaves open the possibility that your God might have used a different method from programming and dabbling, and the only one you and I can think of – apart from randomness, which we both reject – is autonomous cellular intelligence. (But NOT with instructions or guidelines, because these once again could only come through the computer programme or dabbling.)

DAVID: How God controlled the advances of evolution are logical speculations. Bacterial decisions follow logical underlying algorithms.

dhw: Your “algorithms” are the same as your “intelligent instructions” which are the same as your 3.8 billion-year-old computer programme for every single undabbled decision. You may introduce as many scientific terms as you like, but you are still faced with a stark choice between these two options and cellular intelligence, and I remain encouraged by the fact that your personal choice is not a belief.

DAVID: I've expressed my view of the original genome above as related to the start of life. The genome contains enormous amounts of intelligent information to exert control over life's processes.

dhw: According to you it contains ALL the instructions for ALL processes except those that your God personally dabbled. I’m not surprised that you don’t actually believe it.

DAVID: Distorting what I have stated again: God is in charge, created a massively complex genome in all its various layers of control to create all of the evolutionary processes. Precise knowledge of how God exerted controls is unknown but I have presented obvious possibilities.

This is excellent news. If God exists, obviously he is in charge, in the sense that he would have chosen the method to suit his purpose. A massively complex genome with all its layers of control to create all of the evolutionary processes would be just as apt a description of cellular intelligence as of a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for all undabbled changes. Since you do not believe in the computer programme hypothesis, your new description seems to suggest that you are now open to my alternative.