New Oxygen research; pre-Ediacaran (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 23, 2016, 10:20 (2836 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw:But the “cell activity” DOES result in specificity, whether your God has preprogrammed the cells, personally directed them, or endowed them with the ability to direct themselves! Just as an ant colony consists of individuals fulfilling their particular roles within the community, thereby building a city with all its infrastructures, the cells in a community DO follow a plan - though in this case a plan of far, far, far greater complexity. - DAVID: I agree with you. Cell activity follows a plan by any of the routes you suggest. Where did the plan they follow come from? - According to my hypothesis, they worked it out for themselves. - dhw; Within the ant community is a guiding intelligence that assigns the roles, and I see this as a perfect analogy for what happens within single bodies, which are also a single community consisting of many communities. Presumably you believe that your God provided the ant community with its plans to build the city, whereas my proposal is that he gave them the intelligence to do it themselves. The same applies to the cell communities of our brains and bodies. The difference is the degree of complexity, not the basic principle of individual beings cooperating to create a city/a body/a brain. - DAVID: Do you really believe your theistic argument above? What you are saying is either God guided or God gave cells the ability to create body plans. Without God whaat is your alternative for body plans? - If I offer a theistic argument, then of course it involves God. My alternative to your divine preprogramming and/or dabbling is that cells have the intelligence to cooperate in designing new functioning communities (creating body plans) which, in the course of millions and millions of years add more functioning communities, thus creating the bodies we know now. The theistic version of this is that God gave them the aforesaid intelligence. The atheistic version would be that the intelligence - along with life itself - was the product of chance. The agnostic version is that I do not know how life and intelligence came into being. My hypothesis concerning how evolution works can fit in with both theism and atheism.