Miscellaneous (General)

by dhw, Sunday, December 08, 2024, 13:04 (14 days ago) @ David Turell

Cellular intelligence: renal cell memory

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?

DAVID: Cellular apoptosis is built into life. Remember?

dhw: So has your God given instructions for precisely which cells should live and which should die when new conditions threaten the immune system? And if his instructions fail, and new threats kill instead of being killed, what does that tell us about his instructions?

DAVID: Do you imagine a life with no deaths? Insane. Death is a built in part of life.

I am not questioning the reality of life! I am questioning your interpretation of cellular behaviour! If an omniscient, omnipotent God issued instructions for survival, how come his instructions so often fail? Did he also issue instructions for death? Or is it possible that he gave cells autonomy, and sometimes they succeed in coping with new threats but sometimes they don’t?

Fighting off asteroid hits

DAVID[…] 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.” I shan’t repeat all the absurdities and contradictiona which are dealt with on the evolution thread and for which you try to blame me!

DAVID: 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.

dhw: What’s “in it for Him” has led you schizophrenically to propose all the humanizing thought patterns and emotions you regard as possible but reject as impossible. (See the evolution thread.)

DAVID: I'm on my own journey with God, not asking for help beyond what Adler has published to guide me. The biochemistry of life requires a 'sourceless' mind.

I am not disputing the latter as evidence of design. The dispute is over your God’s purposes, methods and nature, and you have made it plain on the “evolution” thread that you have fixed wishes and beliefs, and although you acknowledge that they are”schizophrenic”, part of your schizophrenia is to claim that you never contradict yourself.

LUCA

QUOTES: The result is a picture of a cellular organism that was prokaryote grade rather than progenotic and that probably existed as a component of an ecosystem,”

"This basically means it’s more complex than they thought".

"this study means that either life can form much easier and faster than we thought, or it was seeded by some sample from outer space.

DAVID: {...] My view is that life appeared as engineered by God, just like the Cambrian animals did later on. It only took half a billion years to appear once the earliest Earth had formed.

As before, the complexity provides good grounds for your belief in a God who did the original engineering. Your belief in his “de novo” engineering of our Cambrian ancestors has led you to one of many contradictions in your refusal to accept that this makes all pre-Cambrian species irrelevant to the single purpose you impose on your God (in those times when your God has a reason for creating life). And our disagreements concern what happened AFTER life appeared.