Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Friday, August 06, 2021, 11:32 (996 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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?

DAVID: You've got it!!! The latter portion of your comment is exactly what God did!

dhw: And now at last it seems that you’ve got it too. Your God did NOT plant instructions for every new antibody, which can only mean that cells have the autonomous ability to process new information, make decisions and create new antibodies without any intervention from him.

DAVID: No. God gave the cells the ability to recognize invading foreign proteins, and add to them a poisoning addition to kill them. The cells are fully programmed to do this.

A programme = planted instructions. The ability to recognize each new threat and to respond by creating new antibodies de novo without any intervention from God does not mean following God’s instructions. I guessed you would backtrack. But substituting “programme” for instructions will not change your acknowledgement that cells have the autonomous ability (no intervention from God) to recognize and respond, creating NEW antibodies.

DAVID: You deliberately changed your version again. My initial response above was to see if you would weasel out of your initial remarks. I'm still with God's programming cells recognition and response, as described above.

What “weasel”? You have agreed that your God did NOT plant instructions (the first alternative) but that he gave cells the ability to come up with their own solutions (second alternative). This ability is the exact opposite of your God programming their responses. And of course it opens the door to the theory that cells have the autonomous ability to respond more generally to new conditions, and make changes to themselves through the adaptations and innovations that lead to speciation. That no doubt is why you are now backtracking.

DAVID: God obviously makes flippers as part of a new species, built for survival. Survival of the fittest did not make a new species, God did..

dhw: It is you who are playing word games. A purpose doesn’t “make” anything! The purpose of the flippers was to improve the animal’s chances of survival. This and other such changes caused speciation. It is absurd to argue that the purpose of a change is not the reason for the change. Speciation happens because life forms change in the quest for survival, whether God makes the changes or the cells do it themselves.

DAVID: The bold is your usual scurry back to pure unproven Darwinism. Living creatures like living and try to survive. That is all the quest for survival can tell us about evolution.

Their efforts to survive lead to the adaptations and innovations that result in speciation. Speciation IS evolution.

Retinal design allows prediction of movement
dhw: 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?

DAVID: Design means a complex plan is formed all at once, and cannot be stepwise.

dhw: You are tying yourself in knots. According to you, your God spent 3.8 billion years changing simple bacteria step by step into complex humans (not to mention all the other steps as he specially designed every other branch of life that had nothing to do with humans).

DAVID: Dragging in the wrong response, as usual. Please discuss the meaning of design for the future, the point of my comment.

According to you, your God either preprogrammed or dabbled every step in the evolution of all species. How does this come to mean “a complex plan cannot be stepwise”? The point of your original comment was that if retinal design “required stepwise development over massive amounts of time, hunting animals would not have survived to evolve the process”. Hence my reply at the top of this entry on retinal design, and my now bolded question concerning degrees of vision etc. Do please answer it.