Hi John Paul. Thanks for your reply:
quote:
John Paul:
If cancer cells were cells unto themselves, ie not a part of an organism, then I would say that yes we would infer ID. However we never see cancer cells except in an organism, which we would infer that organism is a product of ID. I would infer cancer cell are a defect in the design. A defect that ID should be able to correct. How so? Once we start looking at organisms as a result of ID we will start looking at genomes as an intelligent construct. I believe this will help us decipher genomes and by doing that help us fix the defects.
That's an interesting take. Let me follow your first couple of statemtents logically. It seems that you state that if the cancer cells lived successfully outside an organism all by themselves, then we could infer ID. However, it seems that ID is often claimed on a multitude of events and organisms that are wholly dependent upon their hosts. The bacterial flagellum, for example, is entirely dependent upon the bacteria for growth and nutrients, is it not? Or a process that Behe has referred to like the Kreb's cycle - is this process somehow seen independent of an organism?
So how can we not infer ID on cancer cells in the same manner?
You further explain that since we know that cancer cells are, for the lack of a better term, cells that have gone awry, we conclude that the tumors are a defect in the ID product? Well my next question is, how would we differentiate between a defect in ID with an actual ID product itself? What is the mechanism we would use to differentiate a defect from an actual deliberate design?
And this also brings up another question - what is a defect in ID? An evolutionist might claim that a defect is a mutation event occurring. Would you agree with this assessment? If there is a program within the DNA of common cells that demonstrate ID, what happens to this program that causes a defect in that ID, which may eventually lead to something as harmful as malignant tumor cells?
To me it seems that cancer cells fit well with Behe and Dembski's ID theory. I have personally not run Dembski's EF on it, but logically speaking, it seems highly improbable statistically for random natural processes to have altered all the genes required for a functional cell to become a cancerous cell. Furthermore, the only way a cell could turn into a malignant cancer cell naturally would be for all the genes to change at once. So to me, cancer cells fit Behe's description of ID rather well.
Your thoughts?