Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Saturday, June 05, 2021, 14:19 (1265 days ago) @ David Turell

Fungi helped plants
dhw: Please tell us which part of the adaptation process takes place independently of your God.

DAVID: God supplies the simple adaptation mechanisms and the organism itself decides to use when stimulated by a change.

dhw: Thank you. We are back where we started: adaptation entails processing the information coming from outside, communication between the cell communities, and then taking the decision on how the existing mechanism is to be used. All of these phases require some form of intelligence, and since the use of the existing mechanism takes place independently of your God, it can therefore only be guided by the intelligence of the cells themselves.

DAVID: My view is it more like an algorithm. With this stimulation use that solution.

This means your God has provided all organisms with a list of every single problem they will encounter for the rest of time, plus every single solution to every problem. It’s not clear from your post whether he also tells them which solution to choose (= no independence whatsoever), or they have to go through the whole list and pick the one that fits, by which time they’ll probably be dead anyway. I prefer your first answer: your God provides the mechanism, and they decide how to use it – which entails all the intelligent processes I have listed.

Neutron stars
DAVID: Your calling my theories illogical, while I point out to you your theories are logical based on the personality of your God shows you ignore my personalization of God fits my theories.

dhw: Your personalization of God offers no explanation at all for theodicy, and continues to gloss over the illogical aspects of your theory of evolution: if your purposeful God’s one and only purpose was to design humans and their food supply, why did he individually (de novo) design millions of life forms plus food supplies that had no connection with humans? We had agreed to drop this subject, since you have no explanation, but back you come with your claim that it is logical!
You continue to do so throughout this and the other posts. For brevity;s sake, I shall simply refer each time to SEE BOLDED THEORY.

DAVID: Why won't you even accept our views of God are so different, my theories fit my God as I see him? I find your God theories logical only if I accept your totally illogical view of God, which I don't.

SEE BOLDED THEORY for how your God does NOT fit your theory. I have offered different views of God to explain different possible purposes. Please tell me what is “illogical” in God as an experimental scientist, as a creator who enjoys creating, or as the inventor of a mechanism enabling his creations to make their own decisions. You have agreed that all these views fit in perfectly with the history of life as we know it.

Clear evidence of common descent
dhw: Evolutionary continuity would be one species developing directly from another. De novo creation of species is the opposite of continuity.

DAVID: Which makes a designer God necessary. You make my point.

dhw: So according to you, evolution is a continuous process, and your point is that God is necessary because evolution is not a continuous process – species are created de novo. To recap: I propose that evolution is continuous in the sense that all species evolve from existing species. However, it is NOT one single continuous process from bacteria to humans, but thousands and thousands of continuous processes as the bush of life expands into branches that have no connection with one another. The line from bacteria to humans is just one of these countless branches.

DAVID: I explain evolution as the work of God. You describe its appearance as history.

We both agree that the history is a bush of life with countless branches. I have no problem with the proposal that your God designed it that way. The difference between us is…SEE BOLDED THEORY. And while I believe in the continuity of common descent, i.e. all species (except the very first cells) descending from earlier species, you believe your God created each one de novo, and for you this constitutes continuity.

Error Correction
QUOTES: “The same process by which those proof-correcting proteins can cut and paste DNA is precisely what enables genes to be influenced by the organism and its environment.”
"Living systems are organised at many nesting levels, from molecules to cells to organs and the whole organism. Each level influences the processes occurring at molecular levels.”

dhw: This is what I mean when I refer to an organism as being a community of cell communities which communicate with one another and interact as they respond to the environment.

DAVID: And my point in the presentation is ignored: "Comment: The error control system had to be present when DNA appeared or we would not be here. The first paragraphs show this." Why?

Sorry. I have no objections to this. As I wrote the previous day: “My objections to the “foresight” argument do not relate to the original cells – clearly they must already have had the ability to reproduce and to change their own structure in the future, and I am not so arrogant as to assume that there were not other aspects of what you call “foresight” incorporated into the original design.” I should have repeated this.