More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 16, 2024, 13:07 (1 day, 16 hours, 16 min. 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.

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

DAVID: They act autonomously as rebels.

Thank you. I wonder why your God gave nasty cancer cells the autonomous intelligence to work out their own ways to survive, whereas their victims could only follow his instructions and pay the penalty.

dhw (under “kinesins”): 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 given 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.

DAVID:The cells' molecules must be free-floating, free to make mistakes, for the system to work!

So cancer cells are not alone in their autonomous ability to take decisions.

God’s purposes for creating life

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.

dhw: "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.

DAVID: I avoid humanizing conjectures with my selfless God. You torture my guesses into real conjectures.

What is a “real” conjecture and an “unreal” conjecture? Don’t you realize that your theory of “selflessness” is a conjecture, and it simply makes nonsense of your other conjectures (enjoyment, worship etc.), to the extent that apparently his only purpose for creating life was to design us and our food, but he may have had no reason (= purpose) for creating life, or for designing us and our food. And as below, you “really” believe he had good reasons for making the universe so vast, but he may have had no reasons at all.

Far out cosmology

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'.

dhw: 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’.

DAVID: Not belief if it is based upon an irrational expectation!

Only God knows the reason why, which means you don’t, which means your belief is as irrational as theirs. But of course, you are all free to believe what you want to. I just object to the double standards: your faith is irrational, but you condemn their faith as being irrational, and they would no doubt do the same!

Human evolution: Lots of interbreeding

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Perhaps He allowed nature to do some experimentation. You want one jump from apes to sapiens? Talk abut de novo!

But one jump is precisely what you advocate for the species you believe your God created “de novo” in the Cambrian! I’m delighted to hear that you have room in your beliefs for nature to conduct experiments. Do you regard nature as a conscious mind separate from your God?

Australopithecus; early hand use

DAVID: Early design of useful hands is a reasonable way for a designer to plan the evolution of newer forms.

You’d have thought an omnipotent, omniscient designer whose sole aim was to design homo sapiens (plus food) would have known exactly what hands he wanted to design rather than working his way through stage after stage and hominin after hominin. This history fits in neatly with the theories of a free-for-all, or of your God experimenting as he goes along. Or, of course, according to your latest conjecture, he may be some sort of disinterested zombie who fiddles with hands and everything else for no reason at all.