More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, October 14, 2024, 13:31 (4 days ago) @ David Turell

Cancer and cellular autonomy

DAVID: [Cancer cells] are rebels using God's instructions to survive. The make His instructions too adequate.

dhw: Curiouser and curiouser. Why would your perfect, omniscient God create instructions which he knew would enable nasty cancer cells to destroy nice ordinary cells?

DAVID: They are the same instructions that run us! Cancer cells are rebels.

What are they rebelling against if they are following your God’s instructions?

God’s purposes for creating life

DAVID: Your 'explanations' are all humanizing.

dhw: As you have rightly pointed out, sharing human-like thought patterns and emotions does not make your dog human, and does not make your God human either.

DAVID: 'Humanizing God' comes from the desires you give Him.

dhw: YOU gave him the desires for recognition and worship, and suggested that he enjoys creation and is interested in his creations. Your proposals do not make him a human being, and nor does his possible desire to make new discoveries.

DAVID: Nice sidestep. I brought up your God's human desires and you switch to my suggestions.

I have pointed out that your suggestions are no less human than mine, and neither yours nor mine turn him into a human being. If you think mine do but yours don’t, then once more you are flaunting your double standards.

Kinesins

DAVID: Again promoting second-hand design. Telling cells how to do it is much more cumbersome than doing the design yourself.

dhw: Why is it more cumbersome to enable cells to do their own designing in a free-for-all than painstakingly designing and having to cull millions of species, 99.9% of which are irrelevant to the designer’s purpose? Why is God doing what he wants to do less efficient than his having to make mistakes he doesn’t want to make?

DAVID: Direct design is straight forward!! Teaching cells is two-step design.

Giving cells the ability to do their own designing is not “teaching”! It is a single invention. Your God does each design himself or teaches cells through “instructions” for every eventuality, and every failure is your God’s. In mine, the mistakes are made by the cells.

The Avalon Explosion

All points covered elsewhere.

Far out cosmology

DAVID: [...] it comes back to dhw's wonderment-questioning about the universe's enormous size and structure. He asks why God made it so big if we humans are His purpose.

dhw: Yes indeed, and there seems to be no answer.

DAVID: The believer's answer is God needed it that way.

dh: But he/she has no idea why. […]

DAVID: We don't need 'why'.

Back to plausibility, which is all we can hope for. If there are facts which raise questions about your “inventions”, it is no defence to tell us to ignore them!

Predicting seasonal change

QUOTE: Even short-lived, single-celled organisms can sense day length and get themselves ready for winter.

DAVID: the anticipation of environmental change is a conceptual idea. Not something a set of cells could anticipate. Pure evidence for design.

dhw: The question is one of timing. Exactly when do they start their preparations? Every organism that prepares for winter will “sense” that it is approaching, and act accordingly, with information being passed on from one generation to the next. The quote suggests that bacteria sense the approach according to the length of the day. I don’t see why anticipation based on past experience should be beyond the range of cellular intelligence.

DAVID: All that is needed is built-in instructions

In your theory, your God has to provide instructions for every speciation, strategy, lifestyle, and problem that ever existed. How about “all that is needed is a single mechanism to enable all cells to make their own decisions”? That would also explain the mistakes and extinctions for which you must otherwise blame your all-powerful, all-knowing God.

Origin of life: more fun in the lab

It’s wonderful to hear of all this research that’s going on, but it’s shocking to hear the inflationary and illogical claims of the researchers.

QUOTE: With the preformed DNA added, the researchers noticed something approaching natural selection, which could explain how simple molecules were plucked out of the ooze and chosen to start the beginnings of life: structures that can move, sustain themselves, self-replicate, and adapt to their environment.

They must be joking! Natural selection never plucked anything out of anything and never chose anything that would start a process!!! Natural selection simply means that whatever already exists and is useful will naturally be preserved, but anything that is not useful will naturally disappear!

QUOTE: The next question is how these DNA templates or strands might have come into being. That's a topic for a future study, but the researchers are investigating several ideas about how this structure for self-assembly could have appeared. (David’s bold)

I admire your self-restraint. They are congratulating themselves on having got precisely nowhere, beyond kidding themselves that natural selection, which never created anything, can actively choose, assemble and give life to the various parts of the body.