More "miscellany" (General)

by dhw, Sunday, May 22, 2022, 07:48 (677 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The complexity revealed in current research in living biochemistry cannot occur by chance. Such a thought is irrational.

dhw: How many more times do I have to repeat that I accept the logic of the argument for design? Now please explain how a conscious, sourceless mind capable of designing universes and life can simply have been there for ever. "Such a thought is irrational". Hence my agnosticism.

DAVID: Your response does not take into account that the complexity of living biochemistry, now investigated molecule by molecule, cannot happen by chance. An operating mind MUST exist. I agree how it came to be cannot be known to us.

I have just said yet again that I accept the logic of the design argument! Chance is “irrational”. Equally irrational, however, is the very concept of an eternal, conscious mind just being there for ever and ever. You need blind faith to believe in either concept. I lack your faith and Dawkins’s, and so I remain agnostic.

Symbiosis and reproduction

dhw: I fully appreciate Nature’s wonderful designs. But I do not see why your God would have specially designed the maple seed pod and two different sets of larvae and bacteria, plus countless numbers of extinct life forms and ecosystems that did not lead directly to humans or our econiches, as “an absolute requirement for the evolutionary process to finally produce humans”.

DAVID: From the start of life around 3.5 bya until the appearance of sapiens 300,015 years ago, was a long winding road. It was never direct. The bold is your fallacy of thought about how to think about God. God did what He did and doesn't tell you (or me or anyone else) why. I accept the history as God's doing.

If God exists, I also accept that the history would have been his doing. And the history is a long winding road leading off in countless directions, many of which came to a dead end and had no connection with humans plus their food. You cannot explain why God would have specially designed all the dead-end side roads if his only purpose was to build one road to humans plus food. So maybe he had a different purpose for designing them, or maybe he didn’t design them at all. Please will you finally stop assuming that he individually designed every life form, econiche, natural wonder etc. and that every one of them served the purpose of preparing the way for humans plus food. That is your theory – it is not the history!

T cell differentiating enemies

DAVID: It describes how scientists are trying to fully understand T cell functions and find they can differentiate self from non-self in six levels. These are vital protections from infection. They must work properly or organisms will not survive. There is no way a trial and error approach will work. It can only appear in its present form if it were totally designed, as is, from the beginning.

dhw: But what is "totally designed" from the beginning? Every new antigen requires a new response from the cells.

DAVID: What is totally designed from the beginning is ability to recognize the invader and form a defensive response. Obviously each new invader receives a new and different response.

It is the ability of cells to respond that would have been there from the beginning, and this ability has not only developed over millions of years, but continues to adjust to each new threat.

dhw: The process has to be ongoing, and in many cases the antigens win the battle until immunity is eventually developed. Once it is, then of course it works.

DAVID: You are confused. The immune response IS immediate, and either succeeds or fails. Your implied failure until success simply leads to the species extinction. A degree of success must be immediate.

First you talk as if every member of the species is the same! Then at least you modify that to “a degree” of success. Covid did not immediately kill every member of the human race who caught it! Sometimes, we even need human intervention to find new ways of boosting the efficiency of the immune system. Bacteria die in their millions before they find a way of resisting new drugs. Once again, the ability to respond (I’ll call it cellular intelligence) would have been present from the beginning, but its range, use and effectiveness have evolved, and I suggest that its present form would NOT have been “totally designed from the beginning”.

dhw: The quote suggests to me the possibility that what was there from the beginning was the mechanism that would enable cells to develop ongoing responses, and the whole process described here reeks of intelligence: the cells sense through interactions, use the information to gauge the severity. Theistic proposal: your God would have designed the intelligent cellular mechanism which has developed and improved the immune system from its beginnings until now.

DAVID: The bold is how we can agree.

I suspect we are in agreement on the whole subject, except that I associate the ability with (possibly God-given) intelligence, whereas in the past you have always talked about God giving instructions for every new case.


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