More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, October 06, 2024, 09:29 (12 days ago) @ David Turell

Free-for-all

DAVID: Freedom of action while following instructions is how life works. That allows mistakes to happen. Not God's fault.

dhw: If you follow instructions, you do not have freedom of action!

DAVID: The biochemistry of life has free-floating proteins in action, free to make mistakes.

Proteins, as you know, are essential to virtually every cellular process, so you are in effect agreeing that cells are “free in action”. Clearly, then, if they make what you call “mistakes”, they are NOT following your God’s instructions’, but are making their own decisions. We are now engaged in three separate discussions: 1) If cells have freedom of action, we have a free-for-all. 2) If cells have freedom of action, they make their own decisions, which brings us back to Shapiro’s theory of cellular intelligence, and its role in evolutionary innovation. And 3) your God’s role in the behaviour of cells, as follows:.

dhw:[…] if the instructions don’t work, that can only be the fault of the instructor. What you call “mistakes” will only be the fault of the cells if they have the freedom to act independently of any instructions

DAVID: They do as mistakes in action.

You can’t make a mistake without some sort of action. Whatever “mistakes” cells make is clearly their own fault if they act autonomously. If they follow your God’s instructions, any mistakes are his. Exit your perfect, omnipotent, omniscient God. You support this “exit” with your insistence that your God was somehow forced into creating an imperfect system which he even tried to correct but now relies on the help of humans to do what he couldn’t do.

Early galaxies

DAVID: the more we see, the more we learn and have to modify theories and models. Not at all surprising. In a fast-moving areas of study like this one theories have to be liquid, not fixed. We still do not know why the universe has to be as it is. I assume it is all purposeful.

dhw: A lovely comment. But if theories have to be liquid, may I suggest that you unfix your theory that the universe “has to be” as it is, and you qualify your assumption that it is all purposeful?

DAVID: Why don't you see the obvious purpose in action?

“We still don’t know why the universe has to be as it is”, but there is an “obvious purpose”. Please tell us the obvious purpose – which we still can’t see - of every single star, planet, black hole, galaxy, extant and extinct, known and unknown, that has ever existed.