Evolution: fish to land animals transition (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, November 28, 2020, 11:02 (1454 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: How about this? Terrestrial ability on land coincided with the origin of limbs, just as marine ability coincided with the reversion of limbs to fins, when the cell communities adapted their structures in order to cope with their new environment. Evolution is the history of cells combining and cooperating to find new ways of improving their chances of survival by adapting to or exploiting new conditions.

DAVID: No explanation of the huge gaps in design from step to new step. Your answer is designing cells, and I ask who taught them how to design such complexity? Magical cells or more logically a designing mind.

dhw: Oops, I forgot to mention that if God exists, he would have designed the intelligent cell.

DAVID: Oops. My God doesn't do second-hand designs. Explaining all the requirements for new designs to individual cells is too complex rather than just doing the designs directly. Note today's entry about product controls designed by god.

Funny, I can’t find a single mention of God in the article. I did find this, though:

QUOTE: A paradigm shift occurred in the field of translation when it was discovered that cells use the translation machinery itself to detect errors and activate quality control mechanisms.

Cells seem to know what they’re doing, don’t they?

dhw: May I take it you will now acknowledge the feasibility of this theory?

DAVID: Absolutely not. God is not going to have designs made by second-hand methods. The intricacies of the biochemistry of life and of the physiology and mechanics of living forms is so complex only direct design will suffice. I don't know why you keep trying in your adopted quasi-theistic state attempt to move God to the back burner for the creation of life and the design of evolution.

I do not! I keep reiterating that if God exists, he is the creator of life and the designer of evolution! But that does not mean he designed every single life form plus its food supplies, let alone that he did so as part of the goal of evolving [= directly designing] humans.

DAVID: Who created the universe? Didn't God do it first hand with no intermediates? He created life all by Himself. Why your need for distancing Him in living designs? Trying to diminish His controls or His importance?

There is no diminution if your God decided to create a system by which his invention would be able to design all its own variations. On the “theodicy” thread you have now suggested that his powers are limited. Just like us humans, he can only act within his limitations. THAT is diminution.

DAVID: Your so-called intelligent cells, without brains, would need a universe-sized instruction book to follow to mimic God's abilities in new design. In all design work it is easier to do it yourself than parcel it out, although when over-whelmed co-equal designers help out at the human level. Please keep God at His level as you attempt to create theosophies at His level.

But according to you, your God did precisely that – he provided the first cells with an instruction book to be passed on for every undabbled life form, econiche, strategy and natural wonder in the history of life! And not just that, but for reasons you yourself cannot fathom, his goal in providing the instruction book for all life forms plus their food supplies was to produce one life form plus its food supplies, although 99% of the life forms produced by the instruction book had no connection with humans. I don’t know why this way of designing humans was “easier” for him, but you can’t figure that out either, can you?