Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 01, 2021, 10:29 (969 days ago) @ David Turell

Part One

Antibodies

DAVID: You always twist my statements. You know full well I believe God gave cells the instructions of how to take action.

dhw: Now we have your agreement that God did not plant instructions but gave cells the ability to make their own decisions and form new antibodies without his intervention – but 4 weeks later he planted instructions.

DAVID: How can you twist my statement above? Cells act thru/follow God's genome instructions!!!

I am not twisting your statement above. I am pointing out that it is a complete reversal of your statement four weeks ago, as follows:

dhw: “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 [God] 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!

Not the first option, which was following instructions, but the second option, which was an autonomous ability. As I mentioned earlier, this form of "volte face" has become a regular feature of our discussions, as in the threads on time and evolution.

Rethinking brain organization
DAVID: Cleared up above: "DAVID: So I'll change it to they [the cells] act as if autonomous."

dhw: Why do you refuse to contemplate the POSSIBILITY that they ARE autonomous, as you agreed, so emphatically four weeks ago?

DAVID: Do you deliberately misinterpret my positions? Cells run on God's designed instructions.

I know that is your position, despite your statement to the contrary four weeks ago. And I have just asked why you refuse to contemplate the POSSIBILITY that you were right four weeks ago.

New amphibious whale
DAVID: […] I see the marked reasons for intense design for each major stage, which keeps you agnostic. I've made a decision, you haven't is our only real difference.

dhw: You are conflating two completely different discussions. It is the complexities of life that help to keep me agnostic, but not the process of evolution. You do not need to add the words “marked” and “intense” to the word “design”: I propose that both minor stages and major stages of development require design, but I dispute the argument that every single one of them, plus every single natural wonder and econiche and lifestyle requires a 3.8-billion-year old computer programme or a personal dabble by your God, especially in view of your theory that every single change was geared to the design of humans and their food. The design could have been carried out by intelligent cells, whose complexities are such that they may well have been designed by your God. This is one of the alternative theistic theories you find perfectly logical but reject because they are different from yours.

DAVID: What I agree to in the past involved your general view of evolution from the standpoint of a very humanized God who had no clear view of any specific goal and preferred free-for-alls and experimenting, nothing more.

You often accuse me of twisting your statements. I have repeatedly told you that in all my alternative theistic theories, my God has a specific goal: the free-for-all is to create an unpredictable and ever changing world which he can watch with interest; experimenting allows for your own goal of producing a life form that will in some ways “mimic” him.

DAVID: Not logical with my view of God. As for brilliant cells doing required design, it is a fantastic extrapolation of cells/bacterial known abilities to make small required adjustments, but always remaining the same species, as in Lenski's E. coli.

And I would suggest that if your God exists, he is perfectly capable of giving cells the autonomous ability to change their own structures in order to adapt to or exploit new conditions. This is no less “fantastic” than your 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every single evolutionary change, or the theory that your God pops in to perform all the necessary operations for every single evolutionary change, and to issue instructions for every single problem.