Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 04, 2021, 09:12 (997 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Once again, on the outside looking in, cells following instructions look as though they are innately intelligent. Our usual difference.

dhw: Your usual desperate backtracking. You wrote: “..we are designed to learn about every invader with newly developed responses we create. We are designed for future problems by making new answers de novo.” […] How can “we create new answers de novo” possibly mean we obey instructions already planted in us by your God?

DAVID: New antibodies to new threats are made by following instructions that exist from birth.

Do you mean that your God planted instructions on how to create each individual new antibody for each new future threat? Or do you mean that he gave our cells the ABILITY to recognize each new threat and to respond to it by creating new antibodies de novo without him having to intervene?

Larvae use virus for immunity
DAVID: God obviously knew flippers were a requirement.

dhw: A requirement for what, if not for improving their chances of survival?

DAVID: Helping survival doesn't advance speciation.

So you agree that legs changing to flippers helped pre-whales to survive, but apparently legs changing to flippers do not advance speciation! The same argument, then, for every adaptation/innovation that “helped survival”. If speciation happens when parts of the body are changed, and if the changes help those organisms to survive, how can you possibly believe that “helping survival doesn’t advance speciation”?

Retinal design allows prediction of movement
dhw: Yet another example of the ways in which cells gather information and send it to the brain cells, which process the information and make their decisions. We are a community of cell communities, all working in harmony with one another, much like my favourite analogy, the ant colony. Where does the guiding intelligence/consciousness come from? The term “swarm intelligence” comes to mind in the context of this analogy – following the line that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. But of course that does not exclude the possibility of God as the original designer of cellular intelligence.

DAVID: This design requires lots more than cells thinking.

Many people (materialists) believe that thinking cells have produced cities and computers and rockets to the moon. They may be wrong, but you might also be wrong.

DAVID: My comment was ignored: "Comment: pure initial design. If this required stepwise development over massive amounts of time, hunting animals would not have survived to evolve the process."

It was not ignored. You quoted my answer, and commented on it:
dhw: How massive is massive? It is perfectly possible that a nerve’s rudimentary sensitivity to light should be advantageous, and that in time, increased sensitivity should prove even more advantageous. Even now, different animals have different degrees of vision, hearing and smell. Do you think your God kept stepping in to adjust them all?

DAVID: Pure Darwinist think. The fossil record does not how gradualism, remember?

That is why I asked how massive is massive? We have no idea how long it would have taken the dog to develop its extraordinary sense of smell. But it is totally absurd to expect to find fossils of every single stage of dog-nose development. Now please answer my question – do you think your God stepped in to adjust the different degrees of vision, hearing and smell?