Evolution: early mammals (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 28, 2019, 10:21 (1854 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It was your usual restated comment. 'Reeking of experimentation' by whom? God didn't need to and cell committees don't have the ability, based on known biology. Looks very purposeful to me.

dhw: Of course it’s all purposeful. Every single new life form has the purpose of increasing its chances of survival by adapting to or exploiting its environment. “God didn’t need to” reflects your fixed belief that you know God’s nature and his thinking. It is perfectly possible that he enjoyed experimenting with different life forms (this would fit in with your fixed belief that he personally designed every life form, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution), or alternatively that he had one particular goal in mind (to design a creature that could think like himself) but didn’t know how to do it (experimentation). “Cell committees don’t have the ability” (I call them “communities” to avoid your ironic humanization) refers to a theory which, I agree, is unproven - as are the theories that there is a God, and that this God’s only purpose was to design humans, and that this God decided not to fulfil his purpose for 3.X billion years and therefore “had to” design everything else in order to “cover” the time he had decided to take before doing what he wanted to do.

DAVID: Your theories about God are all reasonable if you assume God didn't really know what He was doing or what purposes He had in mind when He created the universe.

I gave you alternatives. The first was that he knew exactly what he was doing, and enjoyed experimenting with different life forms, i.e. if he exists, he created the universe and life for his own enjoyment, much as a painter enjoys his own paintings (your very own image). What is wrong with that as a purpose? “Didn’t know what he was doing” is a negative view of my suggestion that if his purpose really was to create a creature that could think like himself, he had to experiment in order to get it. Why is this such anathema to you?

DAVID: The God you describe in these theories is simply a human version of non-God-like humanized God. Every attribute is what an exploring experimenting human might do.

And according to you, your God “very well could think like us.” That doesn’t mean he’s human, of course. I don’t know of any human who could create a universe.

DAVID: As for your cellular theory, which has to have the ability for creating new complex biochemicals and their complex biochemical reactions with a useful product, it can only be the result of complex instructions. Read James Tour and recognize the extreme difficulty of creating something new in organic chemistry, a job cells do easily all the time. A designer is required.

Thank you for at last acknowledging that cells can create something new. This is real progress. How they acquired such intelligence is of course a mystery, as are the origin of life and consciousness, but I have always agreed that the intelligent cell may have been designed by your God. I am an agnostic, remember?

I’ve googled James Tour, and have found an interesting discussion on both sides of the controversy, and it mentions him: clearly he believes in God as the supreme designer, but of course that does not preclude cellular intelligence.
Are Cells Intelligent? - evo2.org
https://evo2.org/cells-intelligent

It also mentions the Nobel prizewinner Barbara McClintock: “The critical factor in evolution was the moment of instantiation of the self-referential cell. How that occurred is unknown, but the fact that cells are self-aware problem-solving agencies cannot be reasonably disputed.”