LUCA latest: Shapiro redux (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, July 21, 2023, 09:10 (489 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: But you insist that only your God could have preprogrammed the editing 3.8 billion years ago, or popped in over and over and over and over again to do a dabble (even though 99% of his dabbles had no connection with the only dabbles he actually wanted to perform). And you find this absurd theory more convincing than the proposal that he might have designed a mechanism whereby the cells themselves did/do their own editing, or ultimately failed/fail to edit themselves successfully – hence the 99% extinction rate which you prefer to attribute to your God’s messy, cumbersome and inefficient method of design.

DAVID: Your absurd approach of cell committees producing speciation is a wild theory, based solely on the observation cells act as if intelligent when it all can be explained as automaticity.

dhw: And there you go again with your built-in prejudice. If cells act as if intelligent, maybe they ARE intelligent! Why do you keep glossing over the absurdity of your own theory, as summarized above, and to which I might add all the courses your God had to give in lifestyles and strategies and navigation and nest-building etc.?

DAVID: In order to reduce God's possible functions, you hand it over to the cells He created.

You really are desperate to find some way of discrediting Shapiro’s theory, but this plumbs the depths. Why would I want to reduce your God’s possible functions? Your own theories are so absurd that even you can’t understand them. I am looking for explanations that make sense of evolution’s history, always allowing for your God as the possible designer. Shapiro’s theory provides a perfectly logical explanation of the history.

DAVID: Cells are tiny factories producing product over and over, nothing more.

Cells process information, communicate, take decisions etc., all of which you agree appear to indicate intelligence. Maybe they DO indicate intelligence.

DAVID: The intense requirements for design of complex biochemical reactions requires a mind in action, one simple biochemical cells cannot create.

dhw: Biochemical cells are not simple, and their immense complexity is a potent argument for your designer God. Furthermore, you agree that their actions appear to be intelligent, but you simply refuse to contemplate the possibility that your God might actually have endowed them with intelligence. Instead you cling to the alternative theories I have summarized above, and you try to belittle Shapiro because his personal research was based mainly on bacteria.

DAVID: I seriously belittle your blown-up interpretation of Shapiro's theory.

I have repeated the exact wording of his theory as quoted by you in your book The Atheist Delusion. Please stop pretending that I have “blown it up”.

DAVID: I introduced you to Shapiro whose work I ADMIRE. But it was limited to bacteria.

It was not limited to bacteria. Studying other people’s research is also “work”, and you have agreed that “Shapiro knew of all the other research”.

DAVID: When you understand bacteria's free-living needs, altering DNA is extremely important. but despite that ability, bacteria are still bacteria. No other more complex organisms cannot [sic] edit DNA in a major way, but simple viruses can.

Bacteria are still bacteria, but bacteria also evolved into multicellular species, and species remained species for millions of years, but they also evolved into new species. You mean no other organism can edit DNA, but now at least you are qualifying that by “in a major way”. Since nobody knows how speciation takes place, maybe Shapiro is right, and cells/cell communities can edit their DNA in a major as well as a minor way.