More Denton: Reply to David (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, August 09, 2015, 10:54 (3185 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: You do not hesitate to impose a purpose on your God - who you believe designed the universe in order to produce humans - and you do not hesitate to propose two methods of production: a 3.8-billion-year computer programme and/or direct intervention. That, you say, is “how he does it”. But the curiosity that has led you from your agnosticism to your panentheism somehow deserts you when it comes to the practicalities of your hypotheses. It's only when alternatives are proposed that you want to know details: e.g. the evidence and whereabouts of an inventive mechanism in the cell (though no-one has discovered the computer programme either), and how cells could be intelligent enough to design complex organs (though you have no idea how God could insert or refine his programmes in millions of organisms). One law for the theist and another for the agnostic?-DAVID: Isn't the computer programme the DNA code and all the overlying modification mechanisms that translate, suppress gene function, methylate, etc.? And God should be able to step in and re-write. How else might we get new species?-The programme has to be whatever directs the mechanisms to change the DNA (innovate). According to you they are incapable of self-direction. And according to you, there is no autonomous mechanism capable of devising particular lifestyles and specially constructed residences. So either the undiscovered programme for all of these was built into the first cells (whose purpose was to produce human beings), or God (whose purpose was to produce human beings) stepped in and rewrote the programmes. And you have no idea how he might “step in”.-DAVID: It has to be one or the other. Doesn't it?-No. Theistic version of my hypothesis: God might have endowed cells/cell communities with the intelligence to direct themselves (though many fail - hence extinction) as and when the environment - which in your version God must also have preprogrammed/dabbled with, or left to chance - required or facilitated change.