More "miscellany" (General)

by dhw, Saturday, September 03, 2022, 09:49 (572 days ago) @ David Turell

Vocalisation

dhw: […] If God was willing to giving to give humans bbbthe autonomous ability to do their own form of designing, why do you think he would not be willing to give cells the autonomous ability to do their own form of designing?

DAVID: Giving us free will at the mental level does not mean cell committees have any ability to speciate and that God would do that is such a secondhand way.

Agreed. It is an unproven theory, just like your own. However, if your God was prepared to give sapiens the autonomous ability to do our own designing, this invalidates the objection that he would not want to give organisms the autonomous ability to do their own designing! If he wanted the free-for-all which explains the higgledy-piggledy comings and goings of countless life forms unconnected with humans plus food, then he would have created the mechanism for it (always allowing himself the option of intervention).

First walking ancestor

dhw: You couldn’t think of a reason why our ancestors would have left the trees, and so it had to be “God’s design”. I gave you two simple possibilities – driven by shortage of food in a particular location, or driven by curiosity to explore other sources for their food. Not feasible?

DAVID: And I am with God designing a form that could descend and they took advantage of it.

Yes, you always opt for the theory that organisms undergo speciation in ANTICIPATION of changing conditions, as opposed to RESPONDING to changing conditions. That still doesn’t tell me why my alternatives are not feasible.

The Big Bang

QUOTE: The good news is that Einstein's theory still holds, but this also means that the mystery of Dark Energy persists for the time being."

DAVID: That means dark matter must exist.

dhw: Give something a name, and it turns into an explanation: “dark” means we think it’s there but we know nothing about it. So 90% of the universe consists of something we know nothing about. One might argue that the same applies to “God” (or whatever name you choose). The origin of the universe and of life is a mystery. Something caused both, but we don’t know what, so some folk say “God did it”, and somehow that sounds like an explanation. We even imagine it having human attributes. (David complains because I propose some that are different from his own proposals). In fact there is no one on Earth who can tell us more than the fact that a mysterious unknown something did it.

DAVID: Written from an agnostic point of view. It is why this important website exists.

Is there anything there that you disagree with?

Immunity system complexity

QUOTE: "All of the life forms on Earth have the same problem,” said Jonathan Kagan, an immunology researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. “And that is dealing with infection.” Just as we worry about bacterial infections, bacteria are on the watch for the viruses called phages that infect them, and — like every organism across every kingdom of life — they have evolved an arsenal of molecular tools to fight infections.

DAVID: An amazingly complex protein defense mechanism of which we apparently have a trace. It also reeks of design.

It all reeks of a great free-for-all, as every life form on Earth, past and present, fought or fights to survive. Those that do survive design successful defences. I find it hard to imagine your God issuing instructions for every attack and defence in a 3.8-billion-year-old book, or stepping in to design each mode of attack followed by each mode of defence in every life form – let alone doing so because each and every one is/was an “absolute requirement” for us and our food.

DNA repair mechanism

QUOTE: "DNA damage happens naturally in human body and most of the damage can be repaired by the cell itself. However, unsuccessful repair could lead to cancer. (dhw's bold)

Clearly, then, the cell has autonomous healing powers.

DAVID: [..] our body's cells come with precise protective feedback loops and repair mechanisms at all levels of biological complexity way beyond what natural evolution could possibly produce. ID is correct.

All life forms have protective feedback loops and repair mechanisms. Otherwise they would not survive. The section on immune system complexity takes us back to the beginnings, and our own system is the product of thousands of millions of years of cells and cell communities finding means of defence and/or repair. Every single example of attack, defence, damage, repair specially designed by your God? Or could it be that he provided the mechanisms whereby cells do their own designing? `


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