How epigenetics works (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, January 12, 2013, 19:22 (4334 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: I have commented several times on this observation, but I feel it is worth repeating. The lump of rock that was proto-earth was every bit as inhospitable to modern life as deep space is. We needed heat, weather patterns, and a way of recycling land; hence those darned earthquakes and volcanoes that DHW likes to lament. We NEED them or we could not exist here. The same with early bacterial stages of life. They were an absolute necessity for any other form of life to exist. Even IF God had just decided to create creatures from thin air, fully formed and evolved, they still would have needed all of the ground work that came before them or they would have been dead in under a minute.-The point at issue here is not the conditions or organisms necessary for life and evolution, but the reason for the evolutionary bush. If a god intended to produce humans from the start (the subject of the discussion between David and me), why did he create dodos and dinosaurs? Why would your "master engineer" make a disposable rocking horse and toy drum before building his roadster? An autonomous, inventive mechanism (itself invented by a god if you like) coming up with innovations as allowed by environmental change is a proposal that would explain the bush. So would a god experimenting, either ad hoc or with a particular goal he didn't know how to achieve.
 
However, I'd like to follow up your own line of argument as it encapsulates an on-going difference between us. You may well be right about conditions. This is the only life-supporting world we know, the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution is the only life history we know, and the mixture of sun and rain, drought and flood, earthquakes, volcanoes, bacteria, viruses, diseases, cures, laughter, tears is the only combination we know. And so maybe that is the way it HAS to be (a kind of anthropic principle) ... but not if the particular god you believe in exists. This is the god who is said to have created the garden of Eden, where everything was apparently perfect until Adam and Eve messed things up, thereby enabling some religious people to blame all the ills of the world on human beings. You say of the earth's history: "No other way would have worked out to be a self-sustaining ecosystem." And yet you believe in Chapter 21 of Revelations, which you quoted as an illustration of your god's power and goodness: "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. [...] Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people [...] And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away." Obviously, then, your God is capable of creating a new, pain-free earth with, presumably, a new self-sustaining ecosystem to accommodate our resurrected bodies (I have asked you several questions about the practicalities of this). I don't know how you can reconcile Eden and the new earth with "IT HAD TO BE DONE THIS WAY".
 
In your response to BBella under "Love me..." (11 January at 2013) you wrote: "Hard to explain what I see in my own head." I think we all have the same trouble, but it's even harder to explain what we see in other heads, especially when the other head may not even be there at all! However, if your God does exist, there has to be some sort of logic behind his actions, and that's what you two theists and this agnostic are hunting for!-****** -This was written before I had read the latest, very interesting exchange between you and David, but I am posing a different set of questions.-
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