Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, December 31, 2021, 13:46 (1056 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your answer is to look at results without considering personality which leads to God's desires. No wonder we differ.

dhw: One moment you moan that my interpretation of your God’s actions “humanizes” him, and the next moment you’re telling me that I don’t consider his personality! How do you consider personality without “humanizing”? In any case, the ONLY way we can extrapolate a notion of your God’s personality is through the “results”, i.e. the history of life. So now will you please explain why a God who designs precisely the system that he wants to design is weaker than a God who designs a system containing errors which he doesn’t want and which he tries – sometimes in vain – to correct.

DAVID: You are avoiding my contention that God created the only working system that could be created, strength or weakness not involved. The God I believe in knows exactly what He wants to create and controls all creation. A strongly purposeful God.

I am not avoiding your contention – I am challenging it! I am suggesting that an all-powerful God may have WANTED what you call “errors” which he was unable to control! If he exists, then of course he knows what he wants. In this particular context (remember, I offer alternatives), my strongly purposeful God intentionally designs what you call “errors” and what I call a free-for-all. Why is a God who can’t control “errors” stronger than a God who deliberately designs a free-for-all?

A cell repair design
DAVID: The point is still imaginary (mental) numbers are required. Pure materialism is dead.
dhw: Please explain the difference between materialism and pure materialism...

DAVID: no difference.

dhw: ...and why some scientists don’t believe in God in spite of imaginary numbers.

DAVID: The same as you are agnostic.

So materialism is not dead. End of discussion, I trust.

T cell
dhw: I remember you telling us that all steps are designed in advance of their being required, and that therefore T cells must have been there from the beginning. I propose that all steps take place as and when they are required by new conditions. I therefore suggest that T cells would have originated when new life forms (vertebrates) were confronted by new invaders.

DAVID: And my point is T cells probably existed before vertebrates arrived, and designed to prevent infection.

dhw: We know the purpose of the immune system. Your point was that T cells must have been there “from the beginning”. I proposed that they evolved, along with vertebrae, when they were needed to combat new infections. All part of evolution’s development from comparatively simple to extremely complex. All the websites I have looked at tell us that T cells originate in the bone marrow. How, then, could they have originated in organisms without bones?

DAVID: Even lobsters (no bones) must have had some form of immunity. Being alive requires it.

Of course all life forms must have had some form of immunity. But the article was about T cells. In your obsession with your theory that your God has in advance provided a programme for every undabbled step in evolution, you claimed that T cells must have been there from the beginning. They obviously weren’t.

Zebrafish inner ear
DAVID: The intelligence cells exhibit is from God's instructions in the genome.

dhw: Do you mean that God tells all cells what to do at all times, or do you mean that his “instructions” have created the autonomous (i.e. information-processing, communicative, decision-making) intelligence I referred to in the passage you agreed with?

DAVID: Yes, the genome instructions do all of that with automatic decision-making.

So we are back to your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old programme for every single undabbled phase of evolution, life style, natural wonder, solution of all problems created by all environmental changes and all “errors” arising from the system which your God designed, apart from those he couldn’t solve and left to us to work out.