Miscellaneous (General)

by David Turell , Friday, December 06, 2024, 20:28 (15 days ago) @ dhw

Cellular intelligence: renal cell memory

DAVID: The cells are built to die at some point. All life ends up dead. Not God's fault.

dhw: I’d rather not talk of faults here, as we are discussing cellular intelligence, not theodicy. So now what are you saying? Your God gives cells instructions on how to survive new circumstances, but he also gives them instructions NOT to survive?

Cellular apoptosis is built into life. Remember?

Keeping the brain clean

dhw: I have no difficulty accepting the possibility that cellular intelligence is God’s design, as I’ve said in the parenthesis. It’s nice to see that you are no longer rejecting the theory. At least for today.

DAVID: A designed intelligence is no autonomous intelligence.

dhw: And there was me thinking you thought God had designed our intelligence to be autonomous, in the form of free will. And you even have viruses mutating on their own, independently of any divine instructions.

Flu virus, yes, and amazingly, our free will thought.

Fighting off asteroid hits

DAVID: the Chixculub asteroid demonstrated how dangerous they are. If we are on our way to 90% detection, we are in good shape to protect ourselves. dhw will ask why God allowed this menace. The answer is our planet came from accretion of many planetoid bodies like the asteroids. Earth would not exist without them. Then dhw will ask why God did not do it differently for safety. Perhaps by some other method. The possibility is there is no other method, but dhw continuously knows better than God.

dhw: You ask all the right questions, and your answers vividly illustrate the confession you made a little while ago: “I first choose a God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.” It all starts earlier than that. Your first wish is that your God should exist. Therefore any argument against the existence of God is wrong. You wish your God to be omnipotent and omniscient and to have just one purpose for creating life (us), therefore the sheer enormity of the universe and apparent haphazardness of heavenly bodies and earthly species that come and go must be some unknowable, inexplicable part of his plan to create us. You wish your God was benevolent and all-good, and so we should ignore the problem of evil. But your other self tells you that nobody can actually know any of this, and so in one of your more lucid moments you confess that your beliefs are schizophrenic, but even then you can’t see all the contradictions I have listed elsewhere. Dhw is to blame for all them! No, dhw doesn’t even know whether God exists, but if God does exist, dhw tries to understand the logic behind your theories, but how can he when you yourself can’t find any logic in them? They simply express your wishes.

I did what you have not done, studied the biochemical basis of life. That is the true start which convinced me life is designed by a superior mind. Then I start to imagine the personage exists with that mind and what's in it for Him, if anything. I admit some of my guesses are wishful thinking.