Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, August 19, 2021, 11:52 (1190 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw (4th August): Do you mean that your God planted instructions on how to create each new antibody for each new future threat? Or do you mean that he gave our cells the ABILITY to recognize each new threat and to respond to it by creating new antibodies de novo without him having to intervene”.

DAVID: You’ve got it!!! The latter portion of your comment is exactly what God did![/b]

dhw: On August 4th you agreed that your God did not plant instructions but gave cells the ability to recognize, respond and invent new antibodies (de novo) without his intervention. Today you fully reject the idea that they can invent new solutions without your God giving them instructions.

DAVID: My totally unchanged position is the cells use God's instructions to do their work. Your bold above says exactly that, which it seems you didn't mean.

dhw: My (bolded) ability – explicitly and enthusiastically endorsed by you - is the exact opposite of the alternative that precedes it, i.e. obeying instructions. You have really entered Alice in Wonderland territory if you expect anyone to believe that an autonomous ability actually means automatically obeying instructions.

DAVID: You don't agree that cells follow specific instructions as I do. Let's drop the word games.

It is you who are playing word games. You explicitly endorsed the proposal that your God gave cells the autonomous ability to create new antibodies without his intervention, and now you are pretending that an autonomous ability means obeying instructions.

The role of survival in evolution
DAVID: Usual distortion: viewing it from God's viewpoint, each stage of evolution must survive until God is ready to prepare the next advanced speciation.

dhw: So your God must change the legs into flippers to enable the pre-whale to survive until the next operation, but the change of legs into flippers has nothing to do with survival. And likewise, apparently every species that ever existed first had to be operated on stage by stage so that it could survive till the next stage, but all the operations your God performed on every pre-species in order to enable them to survive till the next stage had nothing to do with survival.

DAVID: Woolly take of my position. Of course God wants them to survive until the next stage is designed.

dhw: And so the reason why he changed their legs into flippers was to enable them to survive, and yet according to you the changes that lead to speciation have nothing to do with survival. Your position could hardly be woollier.

DAVID: I didn't realize you knew how speciation occurred!!! You are back to bit by bit adaptations leading to new species. I'll stick with God speciates and makes sure existing species know how to survive.

Nobody knows how the mechanisms for anatomical change actually work. Nor can we draw a precise borderline between adaptation and innovation. We can’t even pinpoint what constitutes a change from one species to another. But if you consider that a flippered pre-modern whale is a different species from a leggy pre-modern whale, then yes, in some cases I would say that bit by bit adaptations lead to speciation, just as more rapid innovations do. However, this is a digression from the topic of survival. I don’t know why you have switched from speciation to “existing species”. Speciation involves change, and you believe that your God designed the changes to make sure the particular life form survived. It is therefore absurd to argue that the changes your God made to each life form had nothing to do with survival.

Retinal design allows prediction of movement

dhw: Do ID-ers all support your belief that different degrees of vision etc. were all designed at once, and do ID-ers all support your belief that your God created species by individually designing every single anatomical change BEFORE it was required by changing conditions, and not IN RESPONSE to changing conditions? A simple yes or no will do.

DAVID: How can I be clearer? Irreducible complexity means all designed at once, with the reasonable conclusion, always in advance of function.

dhw: A yes or a no would have been a lot clearer. I take it then that ID-ers claim that there has been no development involved in, say, the modern dog’s sense of smell as compared to that of its pre-doggy ancestors. And God operated on pre-whales to turn their legs into flippers before they entered the water, as opposed to whales entering the water first, with legs adapting to the new environment by eventually turning into flippers.

DAVID: The dog's sense of smell comes from their wolf ancestors.

Yes, wolves have an equally acute sense of smell. Do you believe that the wolfie-doggy sense of smell was already present in pre-wolfie-doggies, or do you believe that the earlier sense of smell improved over the thousands and thousands of years?

DAVID: You answers appears to show you understand the concept of irreducible complexity. Flagella are the typical example.

Fine. Do ID-ers believe that your God changed legs to flippers before pre-whales entered the water, as opposed to legs becoming flippers after entry into the water?