More Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 16, 2024, 11:53 (13 days ago) @ David Turell

Giant viruses

DAVID: The history of evolution had extinction requirements. You continue to torture
Raup's book. All of evolution required a 99.9% lost.

You have confessed YOUR distortion of Raup’s book on the “evolution” thread: “All Raup said was 0.1% are the living result.” Nothing to support your wacky theory.

DAVID: Please find some definition of evolution to see that it requires loss of species.

Please find one for me. Changing conditions have resulted in 99.9% extinction and in new species emerging. That is history. It doesn’t mean that an all-powerful God was forced to design species irrelevant to his purpose!

DAVID: God chose to evolve us is obvious if one believes in God.

Stop leaving out the fact that he would also obviously have chosen to evolve (but not necessarily to individually design) all the species that had no connection with us.

dhw: But you think such suffering is justified because your God wants to give us a challenge. Please tell us why you think he wants to challenge us.

DAVID: If you wish everyone sat peacefully around doing nothing just eating and sleeping, would you want a life like that? I'll take the challenges!

dhw: I have no idea why you think an interesting life would be impossible without rape, murder and millions of deaths from the diseases for which you blame your God. You keep telling us under “Theodicy” to ignore the evil and focus on all the good your God has created! Now we should forget all the good (the joys of love, family, friendship, art, sport, travel, etc.), and you thank God for creating or allowing evil to prevent you from getting bored.

DAVID: Is living just eating and sleeping? No mental activity? We should just be bugs.

No, it isn’t just eating and sleeping. So why have you pretended that it would be just that if there was no evil? I have given you a list of the “goodies” which we can enjoy without evil. You are tying yourself in knots.

Centriole (now first cause)

DAVID: I'll stick with there must be a first cause.

dhw: I agree. The basic choice lies between an eternal, conscious, sourceless mind and an eternal, infinite mass of ever changing matter and energy forming endless combinations which eventually produce the first forms of life. One of these must be the truth, but I can’t choose between them.

DAVID: Hint: organic molecules just don't join up. It requires lots of energy or magical enzymes which appear with just the right fits!!

No need to hint. I keep telling you I accept the logic of design! But even you admit that belief in the being described above requires irrational faith.

The wild Milky Way center

QUOTES: “A huge black hole with high-speed stars in all sorts of wild orbits…”

“A few stars win the collision lottery…"

dhw: Bearing in mind that ours is only one of billions of galaxies in a universe that contains trillions of stars and quintillions of black holes, I can’t help feeling that the lottery image is more appropriate than that of design.

That was the unanswered end of my post, but somehow a whole section of bacteria quotes was added to it.

Microbiomes and post-surgical infections

DAVID: the infections occur, not because the bacteria are 'bad', but they are freely built to survive on any food available. Not God's fault. Bacteria necessarily live as freely-acting organisms.

dhw: And yet a couple of weeks ago, you wrote: “What is fair is to blame God for natural disasters: earthquakes, terrible storms, and bugs causing diseases, non-human parts of his creation.” Why are you blaming him, if it’s not for the fact that he knowingly gave bacteria the freedom to infect us as well as help us? And why then would you not blame him if he knowingly gave us the freedom to do evil? Or do you mean that your omnipotent and omniscient God was powerless and too ignorant to prevent the evil caused by his inventions?

DAVID: God had to accept tradeoffs to produce life. He created the best form of life He could. We need good skin microbiomes. A slicing scalpel makes no choices, just an instrument of delivery.

“Had to”…! “best he could…”? Today he’s lost his omnipotence and omniscience. A few days ago he was to blame. Yesterday all of these evils were necessary to provide a challenge and to prevent boredom. Which of your versions are you going to offer us tomorrow?

Storms are needed

DAVID: The pigmy human mind does not see God's reasons for dangerous storms, until research explains God's reasons. Thus, lots of thoedistic complaints await answers.

Like Dawkins, you wait for science to confirm what you wish to believe. Meanwhile, you have 50 million flu victims from 2018 and about 11 million holocaust victims haunting you as you announce that God allowed them to die in order to relieve the boredom, or their deaths don’t matter because God did so much good, or they shouldn’t object, because God must have had a good moral reason though you can’t think of one.