Let's study ID: giraffe plumbing (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 12, 2021, 11:02 (1136 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God can create from no precursors, can't He?

dhw: Yes. And that is your first problem: if your God’s only purpose was to produce humans plus food, and he can create whatever he likes from no precursors, why didn’t he do just that (as in Genesis)? Second problem, why did he first design all those other life forms and foods that had no connection with humans? Your answer to both questions: No idea. Go and ask God.

DAVID: God can do it any way He wants. History records what happened. Live with it.

Of course if he exists, God can do what he wants. And clearly if all he wanted was humans and their food, then logically he could have directly created humans and their food. It is you who can’t live with history, which shows that logically he must have wanted more than just humans and their food, since according to you he designed countless now extinct life forms that had no connection with humans and their food.

DAVID: God does not have to be logical. The contradictions are all made up by your misunderstanding of how to look at God.

How do you know that yours is the only way to look at God? How do you know that God is not logical? On Monday March 30th 2020 (“David’s theory of evolution Part Two”) I asked you why you were trying to withdraw your earlier statement that your God probably had thought patterns and emotions similar to ours, and you replied: “We can only know his logic is like ours.” (You’ve repeated this several times since.) You yourself are a true champion of logic in your examination of life’s complexities, from which you logically conclude that there must be a designer. You only renounce logic when your own theory of evolution falls apart under scrutiny.

Immunity system complexity
DAVID: See new entry today about RNA science for vaccinations and corrections of errors.

dhw: The entry has nothing to do with vaccinations or invasions: it concerns “a neuromuscular disease...triggered by a genetic malfunction “ But even here, we have a thinking analogy: 'You can think of the RNA polymerase as a newspaper reporter and the spliceosomes as a very, very stringent editor that cuts 9 out of 10 paragraphs the reporter writes.” And the author acknowledges a mystery:

QUOTE: “The only limiting thing here is our understanding of how the RNA is controlled by various regulatory programs within the cell.”

DAVID: Note the authors, like me, expect tight regulatory controls, i.e., automaticity.

I note that you have ignored Shapiro’s advocacy of cellular intelligence, and I note that the above statement and the one below both acknowledge that we do not know how the cell exercises control and makes its decisions:

QUOTE: "Using high-precision experiments, mathematical modeling, and artificial intelligence, Kinney aims to clarify these mysteries at the level of molecular biophysics— how the spliceosome reads the RNA sequence and makes its cutting decisions.”

DAVID: All of this reads as automatically controlled reactions following instructions. No sign of cell thought involved.

dhw: So we still don’t know how cells make their decisions when there’s an error in the system your God designed (genetic malfunction) or nasty invaders attack the system from outside.
DAVID: We do know: The protein molecules make a mistake from the proper action required in folding or joining. What is expected automatically turns out wrong.

That is the cause of the problem. But we do not know how cells take the decisions to correct the mistakes.

dhw: But according to you, in the case of invasion the cells themselves build up a library of responses with each new antibody adding a new volume, but they don’t build it up because your God has already preprogrammed them……

DAVID: Yes He has programmed them!!! To each invader the cells automatically recognize the invader (non-self) And add by instructions proteins to some of the invaders proteins which modify or kill the invader, creating the new anti body for the library.

You are again describing the general process, but each antibody is new and requires a new creation which is then added to the library. WHAT, then, has he preprogrammed? You simply throw in the word “automatically” as if it proved there was no thought involved, and you throw in the word “instructions” which, when I ask for clarification, turn out to be God saying “Recognize the invader and make a new antibody to kill it off.” You have said explicitly that he does not dabble, and so you are left with no alternative: the cells make their own decisions. (But your God may have given them the ABILITY to do so.)

dhw: ….or pops in to give them vague “instructions” although he doesn’t intervene. Mystery upon mystery!

DAVID: Pure invention of your rigid mind in this area of discussion. See clear statement above repeated for the nth time.

Not clear. Please tell us precisely what these “instructions” consist of, if they are not as I have described above. And if they already give the complete “recipe” (= “preprogrammed”) for the new antibody, what exactly is added to the library?