DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 15, 2014, 14:46 (3659 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: He also produced the monarch butterfly, the tyrannosaurus, the trilobite and the duck-billed platypus against all odds of chance. Life itself is against all odds of chance. You say God thinks like us, you insist that he had a particular purpose, but when I challenge that purpose and offer you a different one, you claim I'm anthropomorphizing God!-My background in Adler's "The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes" is where we part ways. Life does look like a miracle, but when compared to the amazing bush, we humans stand out as something apart. Your thinking equates us with the duck-bills as just another twig. That amazing separation is what tells me His purpose. Our consciousness and our much more agile and useful body form is light-years apart from the apes or anything else. And evolutionary theory tells me for no good driving reason or challenging change in nature .
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> dhw: I invent hypotheses that are no more and no less unreasonable than yours. If I thought one hypothesis was reasonable enough to believe in, I would climb down off my picket fence!-Your IM hypothesis as an extension of epigenetic mechanisms is certainly reasonable. But you don't describe where the IM came from, other than to point to cooperating cells conjuring it up. What your theory lacks is the recognition that such a mechanism requires initial information at some stage in the development of complex life, and there is no evidence that living forms can self-develop such a complex bundle of information. A code carries information, but in and of itself, it cannot supply information it does not have. If a code is modified and a new result appears, it only means that a previous supply of hidden information was brought to the forefront. As Spetner implies, it was all implanted at the beginning. -> 
> dhw: ...to postulate that energy was somehow organized into consciousness from no beginning is also beyond my reasoning capacity.-I understand that. That is why your rump is on the pickets. 
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> DAVID: Therefore, I can accept only conscious energy as a first cause. Yu have rejected chance as the cause for the appearance of the universe and life, but injected it again at a prior level of development. You are not consistent. Try leaving out random chance in your thinking and see what happens.
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> dhw: You insist that consciousness could only have been designed, and you insist that consciousness was always there. You are not consistent. Both hypotheses are beyond anyone's reasoning capacity, and you admit as much when you acknowledge that belief in conscious first cause energy is a matter of faith. So try applying reason to your faith and see what happens.-One more time. Amorphous energy particles as a first cause have no impetus to self-organize into a designing consciousness. You accept cause and effect, but then your initial energy proposal is chance organization into something constructive. Therefore to me your approach makes no sense. Rationally, there has to be organized energy as first cause to start any meaningful sequence, for me a universal consciousness. I don't need faith to get to that conclusion. My faith is my conclusion that I am right. No other approach makes sense to me.