More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 15, 2024, 11:51 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

Cancer and cellular autonomy

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

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

DAVID: They use God's perverted instructions to attack normal cells.

Do they or do they not have the autonomous ability to take their own decisions?

God’s purposes for creating life

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

dhw; 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.

DAVID: Once more: your God's desires are very humanizing and you seem blind to it. I am not frightened by your invented accusations of dreaded double standards. Only pure thinking agnostics don't have it.

"Humanizing" is dealt with on the evolution thread for the umpteenth time. You offer us your own humanizing conjectures but reject mine because you say they are humanizing. That = double standards.

Kinesins

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: As evolution is purposeful, cells must be directed to that goal. No, in my system the cells' molecules make the mistakes.
And under “predicting seasonal change”:
DAVID: The cells' free-floating molecules make the mistakes. God doesn't. That issue is quite clear.

Design is straightforward, so your God designs each species and lifestyle and strategy etc. directly, but the cells he designs make mistakes. Doesn’t that mean there is a fault in the way he has designed the cells? Or does it mean that he has give the cells the freedom to work out their own ways of achieving “the goal” (which I take to mean survival)? As I pointed out: That would also explain the mistakes and extinctions for which you must otherwise blame your all-powerful, all-knowing God.

Far out cosmology

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

dhw: But he/she has no idea why. […]

DAVID: We don't need 'why'.

dhw: 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!

DAVID: I am willing to accept that only God knows why. It is called 'belief'.

You are in the good company of atheists, whom you accuse of ignoring all the facts gathered under the banner of intelligent design. Are you “willing to accept” that chance is the only possible explanation for life because that is what is called ‘belief’.

Origin of life: more fun in the lab

dhw: 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.

dhw (to David): 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.

DAVID: Thank you. I produce this stuff as a lesson in true thought, not the OOL propaganda.

Yes, it’s important to keep things in perspective, especially these days when so many sensational new “discoveries” are made every week!

Human evolution: Lots of interbreeding

DAVID: Each sub-group contributed useful genetic attributes such as the well-known immunity contribution from the Neanderthals. A designer might have done this to make His work simpler, with each group supplying useful attributes from their environmental experiences.

If his one and only purpose was to design sapiens, wouldn’t it have been “simpler” just to design sapiens? All these comings and goings look like a free-for-all to me, or possibly – still with your designer – lots of experimenting.