DAVID: Cosmology: milky way size is enormous (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, July 05, 2019, 12:39 (1969 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

Under “Theoretical origin of life”

DAVID: this essay from the ID community doesn't require much imagination or extrapolation to understand how they support my approach to the origin of life and to evolution by the intelligence of God. dhw constantly demands that I name names of ID folks. This piece is by Michael Egnor, neurosurgeon.
And:
DAVID: Tour, Axe, and Meyer should be enough names to silence dhw's demands for names and it should be clear ID is in full support of my theories.

As I keep saying, they support your theory that life had to be designed, an argument which I have never disputed. There is no support whatsoever for your theory that your God’s one and only purpose was to create H. sapiens, that he preprogrammed or dabbled every other life form etc., and that he did so in order that they could eat or not eat one another until he designed the only thing he wanted to design. Please stop separating the different strands of your theory when you know it is the combination which I object to and for which you can find no support from the scientific, philosophical or religious community.

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dhw: Your God, if he exists and if we accept common descent, would have decided in one way or another to create ALL life forms through the process of evolving them from bacteria, and indeed you have him specially designing them ALL by preprogramming or dabbling them. So in your version he says to himself: “I only want to specially design H. sapiens, and so I will specially design the whale’s flipper, the cuttlefish’s camouflage, the monarch’s lifestyle and the weaverbird’s nest etc. so that they can all eat or not eat one another, and then I will specially design lots of hominins and homos before I specially design the only thing I want to design, which is H. sapiens.” And you find this logical.

TONY: I haven't read the full discussion yet, but I would love to sink my teeth into this passage here, if I may. It's been a while and I'm rusty.

But you are welcomed back with a loud cheer. I do hope you and your family are well, and that life has returned to normal after the hurricane.

TONY: For starters, I am assuming, for the sake of this argument, that God exists. I think designed, dabbled, perhaps even played with evolution, albeit carefully and wondrous attention to detail. Now, here is a subtle difference in the way I view the issue. There is no logical need for humans specifically to have been the end goal from the beginning, but that doesn't exclude them from having been planned for long before they arrived on the scene. I'm a designer. It's what I do, regardless of my day job. I design games, programs, businesses and business models. All sorts of garbage. I would never, ever, in a million years think of trying to implement something as complex as, say, Artificial Intelligence, without having practiced on something far, far less complex.

This ties in with two of the hypotheses that David rejects: 1) Your God knew what he wanted (humans), but had to experiment in order to get it; 2) he “played with evolution” and eventually hit on the idea of humans. I note that you exclude the possibility that he deliberately installed an autonomous mechanism, enabling organisms to devise their own means of coping with or exploiting changing environmental conditions (and I wonder if you think he left these to chance or also controlled them).

TONY: Perhaps we are seeing the result of the most cosmic learning curve imaginable, and we are part of it. You can hardly deny the symmetry in systems at scale. Our brains are incredibly similar to the universe in structure. Why is it not possible they are also similar in nature?

I like this idea. If God exists, he learns as he goes along (akin to process theology); if he doesn’t, the whole universe including life is a product of pure chance (I don’t like this idea!) or is a product of zillions of intelligent blobs learning as they go along, combining into ever more complex forms and eventually producing you and me, and who knows what else is to come? If the theist me asks the atheist me where that intelligence came from, I will ask him where his God’s intelligence came from. If he says it was always there, I will say that blobs of intelligence were always there. The agnostic me doesn’t know what to believe.