Innovation and Speciation: earliest fully a whale (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 01, 2019, 14:53 (2001 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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?

The cells run intelligently (a human interpretation of how they react to stimuli and produce proteins) due to the instructive information they contain. Protein molecules transmit their fixed functional ability by being in special shapes. Cells do not think.

DAVID: I am not sourceless through my beliefs.

dhw: It is your God who is sourceless.

Agreed

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.

dhw: 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.

You just don't like the concept that God evolves everything He wants. But it is the history we know.