Cosmology: Latest theories of everything (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 02, 2017, 11:33 (2669 days ago) @ John Kalber

Once again, I shall have to cherry-pick statements in order to explain why I have problems with your faith.

reblak: A faith - relying upon established fact may well be wrong - it cannot possibly be ‘irrational’!

All our explanations “rely on” established facts. The mechanisms of life are a factual starting point. David argues rationally that they are too complex to be the product of chance, and so he believes in a designer. However, there are rational objections to belief in a designer:

reblak: There is nothing we know of that can explain how life came about. This ‘absence’ gives no credence to engaging some sort of magic (God) as being the solution.

Agreed. But you don't have a rational explanation yourself. As you say, nobody does.

reblak: By a process of simple atomic acquisition, much as in my H2O example – (evolution is an inherent feature of nature and includes inorganic materials), these basic facilities mark life as a survivor. That is, to me an ‘unarguable’ fact, though the actual process I have suggested is not!

Of course it’s a fact that life survives. But that is not the problem. The problem is how life and its mechanisms originated, and if you truly (and I would say irrationally) believe that it is a matter of “simple atomic acquisition”, I challenge you with all the intellectual powers at your disposal to create from scratch a living being that can reproduce and evolve.

reblak: The fact is – however you choose to describe it - that this process is and must be an automatic function created either by Mother Nature – or maybe, like atomic energy, is a fundamental physical reality. I do not believe life fits in this idea (first mooted by Sir Fred Hoyle).

Again, once you dismiss the irrational idea of a conscious designing mind, you place your faith in the equally irrational idea of unconscious Mother Nature’s creative genius.
You go on to talk about the necessity of food for survival, first life occurring in the sea, and additions leading to different outcomes, by which I presume you mean the vast bush of species extant and extinct. No problem here.

reblak: These developments were entirely automatic at each and every stage.

You have now moved to the mechanics of evolution itself and abandoned the problem of the origin of life and its mechanisms, as if it’s enough to say we don’t know what it is and that proves it must be automatic. I agree that evolution proceeds by additions (increased complexity, as in totally new organs) and I would add rearrangements (as in adaptations, and in existing structures changing their function: e.g. fins to legs), but I see all these as being too varied and too complex to be "automatic". Each one seems to me to require some form of responsive, organizing intelligence, perhaps seated in the cell itself, which combines – as you say – with other living cells to create the vast variety. (Intelligence is not synonymous with success, of course. Hence extinctions.) However, even this hypothesis would not solve the mystery of the origin of the intelligent cell.

reblak: I maintain that in acts of comprehension, the final absolute certainty of the truth of a matter may not need (and may never get) a total confirmation.

Of course we can’t get absolute certainty, but both you and David have taken the leap of faith that enables you to ignore all the rational objections to your beliefs.
I don’t find your nut analogy as helpful as the generalizations it is meant to illustrate, so I will move onto those:

reblak: First came a nebulous need by a newly acquired ‘addition’.

In the context of evolution, the need is far from nebulous. The most immediate need is for survival in a particular environment, but I would argue that there is a built-in intelligence that also looks for improvement. That explains why life has moved beyond survival (bacteria have survived perfectly well from earliest times).

reblak: Here may I remind you that atoms automatically attract others. This attraction is itself a basic lead to awareness! In attracting other atoms a foundation is created.

The rest of this paragraph seems to me to echo the hypothesis I offered you in my response on Monday 17 July at 09.07 under “Reasons why ID must be considered”. I’ll repeat the relevant paragraph to save you the trouble of searching.

This brings us back to the problem of how organic life and intelligence arose from inorganic materials – a question nobody can answer. But instead of your “Mother Nature” or David’s God, one can perhaps speculate that even the simplest of materials also have a form of intelligence – far more rudimentary than that of organic cells, but nevertheless endowing them with the ability, as you say, to combine atoms with atoms and form new materials. This idea, as you probably know, is a form of panpsychism, which seems to be enjoying a bit of a revival. What it comes down to basically is life and consciousness evolving bottom up from its most rudimentary forms to its most sophisticated. Some forms of panpsychism are theistic – but one might just as well have faith in a zillion bottom-up evolving consciousnesses as in a single top-down creative consciousness that has existed for ever. I’ll stop here to see whether these ideas have any resonance with you.

And I’ll stop again in the hope of a direct response to all of the above.