Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, December 20, 2021, 06:54 (858 days ago) @ David Turell

T cells

DAVID: What God did is in our imaginations, and depends upon the type of God in your mind when you suggest His actions, which I still see as very human, as in the decisions just stated.

dhw: Yes indeed. If we assume that God exists, you imagine him designing a system containing solutions to every problem, except that his instructions led to mistakes which even he could not correct. I imagine a God who designed a system that allowed organisms to solve or not solve problems by themselves. I have no idea why you consider your imagined God to be less human than my imagined God.

DAVID: The difference is obvious to anyone who actually believes in God, instead of pretend.

Please explain why a God who designs a system that leads to mistakes which he cannot correct is “obviously” less human than a God who designs a system that allows for individual decision-making.

DAVID: (taken from your "Theory of evolution, Part Two"): Your so-called God chooses errors (chance mutations) to advance evolution. Who knows what monsters might be created.

dhw: It is you who unwittingly present chance mutations in the form of “errors” which your God cannot control even though he designed the system himself! I am proposing deliberate decisions as an alternative. Intelligent Design as the product of intelligent cells (possibly designed by your God) is NOT random.

DAVID: Again in your imagination, a weak God who allows secondhand design.

Please explain why a God who cannot control the “errors” committed by the system he designed, is stronger than a God who deliberately gives organisms the intelligence to do their own designing.

https://genesisapologetics.com/whales/
QUOTE: "When it comes to the number of changes to go from a land mammal to a whale, biologist Richard Sternberg remarked, “Just think of all the parameters that would have to be modified and then multiply that by a thousand fold or more than that—that’s the scale of the problem that you’re dealing with in the context of Darwinian evolution.”[viii] One of these complex changes would be moving the reproductive organs to inside the body and somehow cooling them when they’re right next to the swimming muscles that generate heat.[…] You can’t explain the emergence of one without the other."

dhw: It all makes perfect sense. Each body is a community of cells, and each change in each cell community requires cooperation with the rest of the body. We are lucky to have fossils that show series of changes resulting in “transitional legs in the water”. (Exit your theory that your God changes bodies overnight BEFORE they have to cope with new conditions.) Just how long other changes took, and in what order they occurred, is impossible to tell without a complete step-by-step fossil record, but no one will disagree that at all stages, the cell communities must have worked together to reorganize the reproductive system.

DAVID: Or God redesigned them.

Yes, but he would also have had to ensure that they all worked together.

dhw: Possible explanations? Do you believe that although your God kept dabbling with transitional legs in the water, he did a total replacement operation on the reproductive systems and noses BEFORE they entered the water? Or did he make these replacements overnight after they had entered the water – because although apparently he knows everything in advance, he now realized that the original reproductive systems and noses could be improved on?

DAVID: The problem is the fossil series gaps. If accepted, we must deal with de novo appearance, which supports design and a designer.

So do you think he operated on pre-whales’ reproductive systems and noses before they entered the water, or do you think he realized once they were in the water that he needed to perform more operations, because transitional flippers were only the start of the problem? I am trying to understand how you visualize your God’s procedures as he designs and then redesigns every single life form as part of his one and only goal to design sapiens plus food.

A cell repair design
DAVID: This system shows the designer recognized damage could happen and provided a repair system. Design requires understanding the future problems that mistakes will cause. We know this biochemistry of life creates life. We do not know if another system can work. Stating that possibility second-guesses the designer, who probably stuck with this working design as the only one available.

dhw: I agree that we do not know if another system can work. I disagree that if your God exists, he “probably” stuck with this one as the only one available. I would suggest that if he is all-powerful and all-knowing, he is “probably” capable of designing a different system, but chose this one because he WANTED the variety created by the potential for change – not in the form of “errors” which he couldn’t correct, but in the form of choices available to the components of the system. Hence the evolution of what we regard as “good” and “bad”.

DAVID: "Choices available to components' takes us back to your unproven intelligent cells inventing complex designs.

Of course it does, and it takes us away from your unproven God and his unproven limitations and his unproven errors and his unproven attempts to correct them.