Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 01, 2022, 15:42 (844 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: As before it shows we think of two different kinds of God. I believe in my kind and believe yours is very humanized.

dhw: And still you haven’t explained why a God who designs what he wants to design is “weaker” than a God who can’t control errors resulting from the system he designed. I would even go so far as to suggest that a God who can’t control errors is more “humanized” than a God who always gets exactly what he wants.

My point, you avoid, is God developed the only system that would work recognizing warts and all. The very complex editing systems He provided show that. Deigning a universe that can contain life. providing a planet that can support life shows very precise purpose, while you version of life weakly gives up control.

T cell

dhw: 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.

DAVID: As I noted they were designed from previous editions.

dhw: It is the nature of evolution that all forms develop from preceding forms. That applies to different types of cell as it does to different species of animal. How many brain cells does a bacterium have??? The whale and homo sapiens also developed from “previous editions”, but that doesn’t mean they were there “from the beginning”!

This whole discussion is a tempest in a tea pot. Evolution by God's design is stepwise from simple to complex. All required for that stage is complete from the beginning.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I won't leave the position of a designer did the work.

dhw: I am not asking you to. The two questions under discussion are how and why he “did the work”. According to you, he issued instructions as above (through a 3.8-billion-year-old programme or through personal dabbling). The proposal that he gave life forms autonomous intelligence to do their own designing does not in any way require you to abandon your belief in a designer. But it would relieve you of the need to dodge awkward questions about the how and the why!

I've admitted I do not know how much design was pre-planned and how much intervention was required along the way. If a designer God is accepted it doesn't matter. Your secondhand form of God letting organ isms do their own thing has no purposeful direction, and resultant humans would be a very surprising outcome, which is Adler's point. Darwin's chance appearance of us is a preposterous assumption.