Cellular intelligence: (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, January 07, 2022, 07:36 (840 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The logic follows. An all-powerful God must produce the system according to His analysis that will work. This follows since He is all knowing!!!

dhw: An all-powerful God will produce the system he wants, and of course it will work. It will work the way he wants it to. He is not forced against his will to use a system that will contain errors which he doesn’t want and which he can’t correct!

DAVID: How do you know that! My point is the current system is the only one that will work.

And how do you know that? Neither of us “knows” anything. We can only theorize. But it is absurd to argue that an all-powerful God is incapable of producing a system without errors, let alone errors which he cannot rectify. That means he is not all-powerful. Why won’t you consider the possibility that he IS all-powerful, and designed the system precisely as he WANTED it?

dhw: […] I suggest they are not “errors” but reflect a built-in freedom to allow for infinite variations, including what we call “good” and “bad” cells.

DAVID: The freedom is the free-floating molecules have the freedom to make mistakes. Not desired by God who designs evolution and added editing systems that work properly at many trillions to one odds.

They don’t all work (think of all the diseases), and please tell us how your God can be all-powerful if he has to make a system with errors which he does not desire and can’t correct?

T cells
dhw: There is nothing “weak” about a God who purposefully provides cells with a mechanism which can produce the vast, increasingly complex bush of life that constitutes evolution’s history. Stop dodging. T cells were not present “at the beginning”.

DAVID: So your God gives up control over advancing evolutions direction.

That is the nature of a free-for-all (though he could always dabble if he wanted to.)

DAVID: And a repeat: T cells evolved from previous forms.

Thank you for at last agreeing that T cells were NOT there “at the beginning”, but just like every other organism that was not there at the beginning, they evolved from previous forms.

Biofilms
QUOTES: "[…] Süel proposes that the patterning could be the biofilm diversifying its resilient cells to try to increase its chances of survival.
"While biofilms have been shown to be more complicated in recent years, being capable of forms of memory and long-distance communication, the discovery of complex structures could challenge the assumed divide between simple, unicellular organisms and complex, multicellular ones.

DAVID: As usual I have to reinterpret this in ID terms. The designer preplans for the next stage in complexity and a giant step was multicellularity with sexual reproduction.

Reinterpret it in any terms you like, the fact remains that we have cells combining and communicating for the purpose of survival, which I propose is the pattern that continues throughout evolution. Memory and long-distance communication are essential for such cooperation, and are characteristics of intelligence, no matter how simple it may be by comparison with ours.

Zebrafish inner ear
DAVID: An experimenting God is a weak humanized form. My God sets His goals and designs them step by step.

You only allow him ONE goal (all life forms etc. are/were “part of the goal of evolving [= designing] humans” plus food), and you have him step by step designing every life form, econiche, natural wonder etc. that had no connection with humans plus food. I will never understand why you regard a God who experiments as “weak”, or why you complain if I attribute “human” characteristics to a God who you have said probably has thought patterns and emotions similar to ours, whom we mimic, who loves creating and watches his creations with interest, and perhaps wants us to recognize his work and form a relationship with him.

DAVID: [..] He creates whatever He wishes for His own reasons and likely watches humans who can do all sorts of surprising things with the God-given free will since they are now unpredictable compared to all previous organisms He designed.

dhw: You are gradually beginning to cotton on. An all-powerful God does what he wants. […] So maybe he created surprising, unpredictable humans and “likely watches” them, because he wanted to create something surprising and unpredictable to watch. Ditto the rest of evolution. Welcome to one of my theories.

DAVID: I can't disagree to this form.

I’m delighted to hear it. So please stop this silly “weak”, “humanized” nonsense.

DAVID: A God who wanted to design humans is my God, who obviously designed them in stages we call evolution. All 'evolution' is a God plan from its beginning.

Yes, ALL evolution is what God (if he exists) must have wanted from the beginning. I’m so pleased that you can now accept the possibility that he wanted the whole bush and not just humans plus food, and yes, humans would certainly be the most surprising and unpredictable participants in the 3.8-billion-year-old history.