Let's study ID: giraffe plumbing: cognition (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 09, 2021, 07:13 (1111 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Not illogical when evolution is understood to be stepwise development of more complex body forms.

dhw: Evolution is the stepwise development of countless complex body forms, most of which had no connection with humans plus food, and you claim that your God designed them all, even though humans plus food were his one and only purpose. You have already admitted that you have no idea why he would have fulfilled such a purpose through such a method. Please stop dodging!

DAVID: I'm not omniscient. I can't know why God makes his choices of method.

You can’t know what your God’s purpose was or what his method of achieving that purpose was! But you insist that you do know: purpose, to design humans plus food; method, to design countless life forms and foods that had no connection with humans before finally starting out to design humans stage by stage though he had the power to create new species without precursors. You admit that it makes no sense, but you insist that it is logical.

DAVID (under “fungus controls male flies”): You have finally understood my designer God makes new species in completely new forms (phenotypes) without precursor forms.

dhw: I have understood this belief of yours right from the start. And I asked you why you thought a God who can create completely new species without precursors chose not to do so with the only species (plus food) you believe he actually wanted to design, namely us. You have no idea why, and you still insist that we are descended from bacteria,although you agree that evolution is development of body forms and not biochemical processes, and therefore we are not descended from bacteria but from your God’s new creations during the Cambrian.

DAVID: You have forgotten my statement that all life forms use the same biochemistry when life started, but even that biochemistry evolved to more complex processes as more complex forms appeared.

Hardly forgotten, since I reminded you that evolution is development of body forms and not biochemical processes, as you confirmed in the now bolded statement at the top of this post.

DAVID: God wanted to design all the species He did design or they wouldn't be here.

If he exists, and if he deliberately designed each one, then of course he wanted them to be here. And that is why it is illogical to say that he deliberately designed all those that had no connection with humans, if he only wanted to design humans (plus food).

dhw: I proposed that the body form gap might be explained by absence of fossils and/or cellular intelligence capable of designing major as well as minor innovations.

DAVID: Absence of fossils for 170 years since Darwin resulting in the gap unchanged or larger is becoming a faint hope. Why do you cling to it?

dhw: I do not expect a complete record of all stages of speciation for the last 3.X billion years, but since new discoveries are constantly being made, I do not regard the book as being closed.

DAVID: How about your mind closed on this subject? 170 years of active fossil searching since Darwin and the gap is the same.

What is my mind supposed to be closed on? Are you saying the search has ended? No more fossils will ever be discovered? But I have offered another possible explanation of the gap – cellular intelligence.

DAVID: As for cells bright enough to jump the gap, the theory is extrapolating the the appearance that single cells do act as if intelligent. That intelligence is confined to their simple responses to stimuli producing standard results.

dhw: Two days ago you agreed that there was a 50/50 chance that cells really are intelligent. I wrote: "So please stop dismissing it." You replied: “50/50 is not dismissal. You are so touchy!” The above authoritative statement is a direct dismissal of the suggestion that cells may be intelligent enough to make major as well as minor changes to themselves, which is the whole point of the theory, as bolded above.

DAVID: Accept that I have my point of view and you yours or we wouldn't have a debate.

The point of the debate is to test the different theories as rationally and coherently as we can. You keep saying that the intelligent cell theory as above has a 50/50 chance of being right, you say you haven’t dismissed it, and then you dismiss it!