Innovation and Speciation: earliest fully a whale (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, June 01, 2019, 09:57 (2001 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What my faith in God causes me to believe has nothing to do with Shapiro's research which I accept also. What strains my credulity is your extrapolation taking what individual cells do constantly in an intelligent fashion moment by moment to then assigned them the ability to speciate new complexly designed more advanced organisms. It is a feat of great imagination.

dhw: Shapiro’s “natural genetic engineering” is based on precisely that idea.

Natural genetic engineering - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_genetic_engineering

QUOTE: "Within the context of the article in particular and Shapiro's work on Natural Genetic Engineering in general, the "guiding intelligence" is to be found within the cell. (For example, in a Huffington Post essay entitled Cell Cognition and Cell Decision-Making[12] Shapiro defines cognitive actions as those that are "knowledge-based and involve decisions appropriate to acquired information," arguing that cells meet this criteria.)"

dhw: You constantly ignore my acknowledgement that this is a hypothesis, not a fact, and you absolutely refuse to acknowledge that an undiscovered 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every single undabbled innovation, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder installed in the very first cells by an unknown and sourceless intelligence is also a hypothesis and a “feat of great imagination”. It is not your faith in God that has caused you to believe this but your faith in your highly subjective interpretation of your God’s purposes and methods.

DAVID: It is the only set of interpretations possible given since I accept that God is in charge.

Anyone who believes in God will believe that he is in charge, but being in charge does not mean creating only automatons! You already have him not controlling local environmental changes, and giving humans free will. Being in charge means creating what he wanted to create, and if he wanted to create intelligent cells à la Shapiro, then what grounds have you for saying that only your interpretation of his wishes is correct?

DAVID: I am not sourceless through my beliefs.

It is your God who is sourceless.

DAVID: Your only alternation to my thoughts is that you want to weaken God by having Him give an autonomous mechanism for speciation, when you try on theistic theories. I won't accept that so-called theistic thinking from you.

Why do you insist that the invention of an autonomous mechanism is a sign of weakness? If he WANTED an unpredictable variety of species that would come and go, then clearly he got what he wanted. And I have no objection to the idea that he wanted humans. I simply object to the incongruous combination of ideas that 1) humans were the ONLY thing he wanted, but 2) he specially designed everything else, even though 3) he also specially designed the ONLY thing he wanted to design.