Let's study ID (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 31, 2021, 11:21 (971 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: I designed with an understanding of current usages, but also of possible new adaptive uses. In our current house which exactly fits our current needs and desires the back hallway ends at a closet for Susan's study. A future owner (which must happen) can extend the hallway and add extra rooms easily, if he desires. To directly answer, both current needs and future possible needs were considered and provided for. God design and human design must use the same considerations. Until you understand the needs for a designer, ID will be Greek to you.

You designed your house for current purposes, and for purposes that you knew already existed – a future owner might want to build additional rooms. Do you really think additional rooms are a step into the unknown, comparable, say, to pre-whales encountering and having to adapt to a new habitat they have never known before? Until you understand that changes to existing life forms occur as RESPONSES to new conditions (admirably illustrated by your account of how the immune system works) and not as anticipations of conditions not yet known or existing, your interpretation of ID will indeed be Greek to me.

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

dhw: 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!

DAVID: But how to respond is already information in the genome of the anticipatory immune system.

HOW to respond is the solution to each new problem! As you keep agreeing, we create NEW responses to every new invasion. What is already there is the ABILITY to create new responses.

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. This 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.

dhw: 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: You really get it!!!

Yes, I do, and I wish you would acknowledge it. The changes take place IN RESPONSE to the new conditions, not in advance of them. And you can apply this process to the whole of evolution, so please stop telling us that design requires knowledge of future needs.

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Same lame comment. A simple concept you refuse to accept. God wanted to produce humans so He evolved them from bacteria in a series of designed steps. God can chose any method He wishes.

And you continue to ignore the very heart of your theory, which is that humans plus their food were his one and only purpose, and yet according to you, in countless series of designed steps he “evolved” (= designed) millions of now extinct life forms, econiches (food supplies), strategies, lifestyles, natural wonders etc., the vast majority of which had no connection with humans. And you have no idea why. Please stop playing this dodging game.

DAVID: I might ask, assuming your theologian's hat is on, how does hour God produce humans?

Do you really want me to repeat all my alternative theistic theories (experimentation, learning as he goes along, new ideas, part of the great free-for-all – although he can dabble if he chooses). You have already acknowledged that all of them are logical, whereas you have no idea how to explain your own bolded theory above.


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