Paul Davies: new comments on Information and life (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 25, 2020, 11:36 (1493 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Wouldn’t you say the complexity of living organisms makes for clearer evidence that a designing mind exists? Now please tell me what is missing from the list of three factors I have compiled above.

DAVID: Your three items are correct as far as they go. Life makes cells from information it contains, and it has translating information that allows it to do that manufacturing.

dhw: Life doesn’t make cells! Life IS cells, and the question is how inanimate matter comes to life. You say information did it. So is information meant to be another name for your God?

DAVID: Life is constantly remaking and replacing cells in exact copies with exact functional information. God supplied all the information needed for life to be functional.

Cells make exact copies of themselves, and cells also form brand new structures (evolutionary innovation). You believe God designed the cells to do both, and he programmed or dabbled all the changes. Here is the continuation of the discussion:

DAVID: Your question: "What do you think your different uses of the term “information” add to this?" it creates much more impressive evidence a mind had to design all of this.

dhw: One moment information is passive and non-creative, the next it is active and creative, and we have information using or translating information to produce biological information, which apparently makes information the source of life. If you want impressive evidence for a designing mind, how about the complex biochemistry of all living organisms?

DAVID: It all comes because of the existence of the different forms of information present.

I have listed them as you have presented them, in all their muddled confusion. Do you believe that information is the source of life?