Miscellaneous (General)

by dhw, Monday, November 25, 2024, 12:09 (1 day, 17 hours, 38 min. ago) @ David Turell

Immune system complexity: sniffing out invaders

dhw: You have dropped this subject, but it is central to our discussion of all theories relating to evolution, including how it works and what role your God might have played in it, as well as the very nature of organic life. I remain mystified by the fact that you agree that cellular behaviour looks intelligent and yet you cannot bear the thought that cells might actually BE intelligent. Perhaps you could explain why you think your God could not possibly have endowed them with such autonomy?

DAVID: DNA complete instructions will make a cell look intelligent. No need for autonomy.

It is not a matter of “need”. Your theory is that your God either dabbled or, 3.8 billion years ago, supplied the first cells with instructions for each and every problem that would arise in the future, to be switched on automatically when each problem arose. The alternative is that he supplied the first cells with the autonomous mechanism that would enable future cells to look for (but sadly not always to find) the solutions. Our example here is the immune system, but the same argument can be applied to speciation. (Hence the mixture of extinction, adaptation and innovation.) Same question again: why do you think your God could not have given cells the intelligence they actually appear to have?

dhw: The next item expands the same subject:

Different birds build different nests

DAVID: […] the weaverbirds only followed one designated design.

dhw: Does that mean God designed the weaverbird’s nest but all the other birds were able to design their own?

DAVID: That is what it appears to be. (dhw’s bold)

dhw: Good news! We now have all these varieties of birds with the ability to design their complex nests. Only the poor old weaverbird has to rely on God to teach him. I wonder how far you are willing to stretch this concession of yours, that our fellow organisms have minds of their own, as opposed to being divinely preprogrammed or dabbled with.

DAVID: Birds instructed in nest design may make individual nests.

Ugh! The other birds appear to be able to design their own nests, but the moment I point out the implications, whoosh! No, no, they have to be instructed, just like the weaverbird. How do you know the birds are not what they appear to be?

Theoretical origin of life: Space is filled with organics

dhw: why did he leave them floating around for about 1000,000,000 years, and then use them to create and cull all kinds of life forms, if all he wanted to do was create us and our food?

DAVID: We are here, against all odds, and you have no answer for that.[…]

dhw: The duckbilled platypus is also here against all odds, and NOBODY has an answer to the question of how life originated. Your theory is that there is an unknown, sourceless being who designed it, and the atheist theory is that the odds are reduced by the enormity of the universe. You simply complicate matters by insisting that your God (if he exists) designed life for the sole purpose of designing us plus food – a theory which dismisses 99.9% of his “designs” as irrelevant, and which therefore shows him to be messy and inefficient.

DAVID: We still don't know why He chose to evolve us.

If he exists, we don’t know why he chose to evolve the duckbilled platypus, or indeed why he chose to create life at all. How does that justify your ridiculing him as being messy and inefficient?