Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, January 24, 2021, 19:19 (1397 days ago) @ dhw

Snakes repel their own venom.

DAVID: Still dodging. We know the poison kills others in the two snakes that are self-protected. Self-protection must be simultaneously designed. The eight otheres have no place in this discussion.

dhw: it’s possible that enough of the two-snake species survived the internal poison and did the same.

Same hopeful dodge. It obviously requires simultaneous design.

Darwin scientists find useless evolution

dhw: I have every right to ask you why you think your God designed molecules that make terrible mistakes. Your answer (that I am saying “God doesn’t know what he is doing”) is totally out of order.[…]

DAVID: God know what He is doing in trying to code for error corrections.

dhw: It’s your theory that God is trying (and often failing) to correct the errors resulting from his design. How does that explain why he designed molecules that make terrible mistakes?

The molecules are acting under orders. A good design with molecular errors is not God's fault. At least He knew they could make mistakes. Living requires high-speed reactions. The molecules know their rules but at times their mistakes happen, which is obviously not God's fault.

An inventive mechanism: A DNA 'Shapiro change'

DAVID: Bacteria are still here as super-important contributors to life. The bad is back to theodicy debates and my suggesting they have a real purpose, not yet discovered, but perhaps as part of the beneficial biome when under control in the GI tract..

dhw: I’m afraid your suggestion that maybe bad bacteria have an unknown beneficial purpose is not a very convincing explanation of why your God directly designed bad bacteria. Maybe he did NOT directly design them, but – theistic explanation - they were/are part of a free-for-all resulting from his design of cellular intelligence devoted to finding ways of survival.

Your usual sop to theism. Remember cellular intelligence is just an unproven theory

Colliding galaxies

DAVID: […] dhw worries that the universe is too large and complicated and wonders why God did it that over-sized way. Not to worry, NASA says the number of galaxies in the hundreds of billions not trillions:

dhw: I couldn’t care less whether NASA says hundreds of billions or trillions (they can’t possibly know anyway). I merely ask why you think your God designed all the galaxies, old and new, if his only purpose was to design H. sapiens. But in the light of the thread on human evolution, maybe you think there are hundreds of billions (not trillions) of ETs out there as well?

We can't know, but can look with SETI without a positive result so far.