Let's study ID (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, July 30, 2021, 13:56 (1000 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Remember I have God in charge of all stages of evolution. Each stage is fully prepared to handle living at that particular stage of evolutionary development. Think of eight/nine whale stages we know, each living at that stage of development into full functional whales.

dhw: I do indeed remember, and I remember that you have your God performing all these operations in anticipation of new problems – e.g. he changes legs to flippers before the pre-whale enters the water. So as I said above, he keeps popping in before they have any trouble breathing, copulating, giving birth and fighting new enemies. And he had to do all that before he could fulfil his one and only goal of designing humans plus lunch. And all these improvements (e.g. in ways of producing offspring and fighting enemies) apparently had nothing to do with the survival of the species. So please remember the alternative: that all these changes took place because each of them was a RESPONSE to existing conditions and enabled successive pre-whales to survive more efficiently in their watery home.

DAVID: I still have no sense of when God does what. I am sure He does all designs for anticipated future needs and use. That is what designers do.

You have no sense of when, and yet you know it’s before any changes are needed. You now have your God, who on alternate days is not human in any way, designing like humans, and you have him and all human designers needing a crystal ball to gaze into the future. In your own designing career, did your work only relate to unknown future events that had never happened before, or were your designs for current use to tackle existing problems?

Transferred from “Miscellany”:
DAVID: Go back and look at all the entries on the amazing immune system. we are born with general protections and are designed to learn about every invader with newly developed responses we create. We are designed for future problem's by making new answers de novo.`

dhw: Thank you for this excellent summary of the process I have been describing. […] At last you have cottoned on.

DAVID: Will you never realize design in advance of existence requires anticipating future needs and uses? Our immune system fits that requirement exactly.

Will you never realize that there is no design “in advance of existence”. As you so rightly explain, we learn, we retain the protections invented in the past, and we create new responses to every new invasion. We make our new answers “de novo” when the problem is there – not before it is there!

dhw: ...we are designed to learn about new problems (invaders) and then create/develop new responses (de novo) to new problems. We are not preprogrammed to do so, or offered courses. bbThis autonomous ability of ours may have been designed by your God.

DAVID: The bold is so wrong. Our basic design by God has the cells respond as needed to new invaders.

Correct. If God exists, he designed the cells in such a way that they would RESPOND to new invaders. Not that they would create new responses before they even knew about the invaders.

DAVID: Your approach is that old species can make new ones on their own. I view it as a weak theory since design must have extensive mental work.

Of course design requires mental work. That is the basis of Shapiro’s theory that cells are intelligent. And the theistic version of this theory would be that your God gave them their intelligence.

TOMATOES
DAVID: I've said survival doesn't drive evolution. Insects have to eat. All of living folks have to have energy, remember?

dhw: And why do they have to eat/have energy, if the reason is not to survive? And when food is short, why do you think they look elsewhere, and develop new means of acquiring food, and why do you think their potential foods devise ways of defending themselves, if not to survive? Do you really think God says to himself: “I gotta change all these organisms ‘cos otherwise I shan’t be able to design David Turell & Co plus lunch?”

DAVID: Of course species must survive long enough for God to move forward to the next level of design.

You still have every innovation etc. geared to survival, much though you hate to admit it. So all non-human species must survive long enough for your God to move forward to the next level of designing them so that he can move on to the next level of designing the only thing he wants to design – namely, humans and their lunch. And you still have no idea why he had to design all those that had no connection with humans.