More Denton: Reply to David (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, July 31, 2015, 19:41 (3185 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We mortals cannot tell the difference between God helping organisms evolve either by direction or by an onboard mechanism for planning that He gives them.-dhw: This sounds too good to be true. You have actually accepted my view: namely, it is possible (I stress that it's a hypothesis) that organisms have an inbuilt, autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism - or “onboard mechanism for planning” - which may have been provided by your God.
DAVID: The first DNA must contain the information that drives evolution from the simple start to the more complex.
dhw: Or as you so rightly imply in your first comment, the first DNA must contain a mechanism that will autonomously gather and process the information necessary to drive evolution from the simple start to the more complex.-DAVID: Great. You accept it!-Accept what? I am distinguishing between your original “information that drives evolution” - which suggests your 3.8-billlion-year-old plan - and my autonomous inventive mechanism, or “mechanism for planning”, which you appear at last to have accepted as a feasible alternative (though you still say you doubt whether cells think). I don't know why you've suddenly sneaked in the question of the location as if that was the issue we were discussing.-DAVID: That is what evolution has accomplished. Is that intelligence hiding in an undiscovered organelle in the cells we study or just part of the original DNA?-dhw: You can ask the same question about your undiscovered 3.8-billion-year computer programme containing all the innovations from bacteria to human. Where is it hiding?
DAVID: As you just stated, in the genome DNA.-I didn't state the location - you did, and I simply repeated your phrasing in order to distinguish between the two hypothetical driving forces. I have always stated that the inventive mechanism must have been present in the first cells, which is as far as I can go, but I'm quite happy to change that to the first DNA if it makes you happy! -dhw: Nothing is too complex for the God you believe in. But you had asked “What is wrong with the simple concept of God guiding everything?” I was pointing out that the concept was anything but simple.
DAVID: There are theologians who describe God as simple, you should remember.-Totally irrelevant. You described God's guided evolution as a simple process, and I showed you just how complex it would have had to be. I don't need to repeat it all, do I?-dhw: Why do you always go back to Darwin? We have long since agreed that on this point Darwin was wrong - hence the theory of punctuated equilibrium. The Cambrian was the biggest punctuation mark of all.
DAVID: But how do you explain the punctuation in the Cambrian, except as above, as you stated, hidden in the original DNA?-As you stated above, through an “onboard mechanism for planning”, which is the exact opposite of an onboard mechanism for automatically carrying out plans already made 3 billion years earlier. (The location of the mechanism is a separate issue.)