Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, January 02, 2022, 11:13 (1054 days ago) @ David Turell

Once more we've digressed from the actual subject of this thread, but no doubt we shall return to it!

dhw: […] 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.

DAVID: 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.

And you still haven’t explained why a God who gets what he wants is weaker than a God who gets things he doesn’t want. I do not avoid your point. I challenge it! I do not believe that your all-powerful God was incapable of designing a system without errors, and was incapable of correcting some of those errors but left it to us to do so. Of course if God exists, he would have had a purpose for designing the universe and life! So please tell us his purpose, not only for designing humans plus their food, but also for designing every extinct life form that had no connection with humans plus their food.

T cell
DAVID: 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.

This discussion centres on your contention that your God designed the whole of evolution in advance “from the beginning”, with every solution and innovation created in advance of the problems and changing conditions that necessitated or allowed for change. How can the immune system of humans, including their T cells, have been “complete from the beginning” when the only life forms were single-celled bacteria?

Zebrafish inner ear
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 […] (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!

DAVID: 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.

Agreed, except that if intervention was “required”, it suggests that your God had to respond to new conditions, which suggests that he had not got everything planned “from the beginning”.

DAVID: Your secondhand form of God letting organisms 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.

We have both dismissed the concept of random mutations as the cause of all the complexities of life. I’ve asked you above to explain the “purposeful direction” of humans plus food, as well as ALL other forms of life that had no connection with humans. Isn’t the brontosaurus, for example, a very surprising outcome from the merging of the original cells with which life began? Every single “natural wonder” that you have recorded for us is a surprising outcome. Yes, humans with our extraordinary levels of conscious are extra surprising, but so is the whole of life. However, perhaps you will finally inform us of your purposeful God’s purpose in creating not only humans, but ALL forms of life, plus all the econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders that had no connection with humans.