Afterlife: Pinker's skeptical thought (Endings)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 11, 2020, 15:51 (1624 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: i remind that cell choices may be according to guiding instructions they contain.

dhw: If cells do not have the option to make their own choices but can only follow instructions, the materialist would have to reject the concept of free will.

Many mterialists reject free will anyway. How do they explain the complexification process in which neurons set up new networks and adjust synapse controls to accommodate differing thought patterns driven by the soul? They don't accept the soul, but at least know the person drives the brain.

dhw: Unfortunately, our fundamental difference is the NATURE of intelligent activity. You insist that each activity has been programmed or dabbled by your God, and the cells are automatons obeying his instructions, whereas I propose that cellular intelligence is autonomous.

DAVID: But you have no explanation for the origin of cellular intelligence.

dhw: I have always allowed for God as the designer. The subject under discussion is not the origin of cellular intelligence but WHETHER cells are intelligent or not.

DAVID: Or designed to react intelligently following guideline instructions

dhw: Yes, that is the “or not” part of my sentence. Let us remember that your “guideline instructions” = a divine 3.8-billion-year-old programme for every intelligent reaction, or a direct divine dabble.

Your 'or not' never answers where innate cell intelligence came from. You give a nod to God a a supplier, and the rest is always nebulous.

dhw: All three “first causes” require blinkered faith if anyone is to believe in them.

DAVID: But one is the true first cause.

dhw: But nobody knows which it is. Hence the need for blinkered faith.

Yes and one is allowed to make a logical choice.

dhw: You missed the point. The article confirms what I told you would be the atheist approach.

DAVID: No I didn't. I simply objected to the assumptions in the quote, asking how do you get from here to there? Neither meteorite nor endogenous formation explains any of the process that made live life. The atheist approach is no approach at all, just hollow words.

dhw: Agreed. It is on a par with the explanation that the origin of life is an unknown, unknowable, hidden, immaterial being without a source who knows everything and can do anything and whom we can call God or Allah or Jehovah or anything we like.

And the miracle of life is totally unexplained by 70 years of scientific effort. A designer is obviously required