Cellular intelligence (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, March 28, 2022, 16:34 (969 days ago) @ dhw

How cells communicate

DAVID: God's immune systems works perfectly, but some bugs (covid) are tough to beat. Be reasonable in your views. God is not ALL BAD.

dhw: How can you say it works perfectly when millions of people die because the immune system cannot cope with your God’s specially designed bugs? This does not mean God is ALL BAD! It means that there is a problem for people who think he is all good (theodicy). Your solution to the problem appears to be to pretend that there is no problem. Is that what your books have taught you?

DAVID: I have never pretended there is no problem. We've had months of theodicy discussions.

dhw: See above: “God’s immune system works perfectly….” and “99+% of all of us are just fine. My glass is full, yours half empty.” Not much of an answer to the question of why – according to you - your God chose to design bugs that kill millions of people, is it?

Bacterial warring way spills over on us when bugs get into the wrong places. Life started with bacteria and viruses fighting.

DAVID: […] So stop sneering at the immune system God provided. Our God-given brains can use God's immune mechanism system producing useful antibodies and boost its effectiveness.

dhw: I am not sneering at the system. I am asking why you think your God designed a system that created such suffering in the first place. But I do sneer at your theory that your all-powerful, kind God would try but fail to provide protection against “bad” viruses, and would have to rely on humans to achieve what he failed to achieve. I would find it far more convincing if he endowed cells with the intelligence to work out their own cures, but THEY sometimes fail, as opposed to him failing.

DAVID: Surprise, God did provide a great systems of immune reactions! As the article shows.

dhw: Surprise: great though that system undoubtedly is, the fact remains (a) that despite your God being all-knowing and all-powerful, it doesn’t always work, and (b) that your kind God created all those nasty bugs in the first place.

DAVID: They get into the wrong places following their proper purposes. God anticipated this and gave us our immune system.

dhw: So your all-powerful God created nothing but good bugs, only he was powerless to stop some of them turning nasty, but he presented cells with a list of instructions to deal with the nasty ones, only sometimes his instructions didn’t work, so he left it to humans to do what he, despite his omnipotence, was unable to do. Don’t you find this just a little odd?

Your view is exceptionally odd. The bacteria which always do good are here since the beginning of life and those that play no necessary role for us didn't leave. WE must have those good ones and put up with the bad ones with our very efficient immune system. You want a perfection for God, and He can't give it to you in a warring living system at the necessary bacterial level. Religions view God as pure and perfect, but what He produced in life makes mistakes, which He obviously anticipated and corrected except, rarely when it isn't. We see molecular mistakes in life's processes and bugs where they shouldn't. Life is a dynamic homeostatic system with required high speed reactions. A rigid controlled system at the molecular level or at the organismal relationship level can't be all there is and have real life. We live with what we have to have.