Life's biologic complexity: Automatic molecular actions (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, December 02, 2016, 10:32 (2913 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Bad luck fits in with my hypothetical free-for-all, which could have been engendered by your God giving organisms the means to work out their own “salvation”. But if God may have arranged for the extinctions, they were NOT bad luck, which you now say is the “proper” theory, so you are back to tying yourself in knots.

DAVID: I'm not in knots. You are assuming my statement that God may have acted on the environment to cause extinction is fact. It is not. Animals are fine until the extinction event which looks like bad luck, and may or may not be God's action.

There are no FACTS in this context! Nothing but hypotheses. But one moment you tell us that the “proper” theory is that extinctions were bad luck, and the next you say God may have planned them. We are going over the same ground as we did a few weeks ago. Two possibilities: 1) what perishes and what survives is a matter of luck, in which case God cannot be said to have had what you earlier called “tight control” of evolution. 2) If God had “tight control” of evolution, he must have planned the extinctions, so why do you keep reminding me that the “proper theory” is bad luck? Once again, the bad luck theory fits in perfectly with the free-for-all theory.

DAVID: (under ”balance of nature”) Define free-for-all.

Each species lives or dies by its own autonomous ability to cope with the environment. If your God preprogrammed or personally dabbled speciation and organized the environmental changes, he would have known which organisms would survive and which would not, so he preprogrammed or dabbled the inadequacies. If he did not know, then you are back to the luck theory, which does not support the concept of a “careful plan”.

DAVID: Remember all early species have been replaced by now more advanced species until we arrived. Not a free-for-all but a cAreful plan. Just as reasonable.

All early species have not been replaced by more advanced species. Bacteria are still with us. And what makes you think that the duckbilled platypus is more advanced than the tyrannosaurus? What is your criterion for the term “advanced”? Yes, uniquely self-conscious humans are here. And maybe they are the result of a divine dabble. However, I’m surprised you still cannot see that if the extinction of 99% of all species may have been bad luck (the “proper theory”), evolution could not have been carefully planned.