Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Sunday, March 28, 2021, 09:02 (1126 days ago) @ David Turell

Possums
DAVID: Your 'communication' never explains how complex concepts like length of possum playing time is determined.

dhw: May I humbly suggest that the possum himself does not know how long it will take, and if he has one grain of sense, he will very cautiously open one eye and very cautiously look around and very cautiously adjust his position until he is sure that the coast is clear, and then run like mad for safety. Now please tell us how you think your God informs every possum about the length of time needed to play dead.

DAVID: Then the eye-opening gambit must be communicated. How?

I strongly suspect that all our fellow animals learn very early on to use their eyes to see if there is anything dangerous around. It’s not a “gambit”. I note that you have not responded to my now bolded request.

Penguins
DAVID: God speciates to anticipate use for new needs.

dhw: So he operated on penguin feet before they entered the water. And how about his methods of passing information to every possum and every migrating bird?

DAVID: Change in genome coding.

Since you ask me to explain how my theories work, let me in turn ask you how and when - i.e. 3.8 billion years ago, or with a dabble when he saw his creatures were in trouble - you think he inserted new play-dead genome codes into the first possums, and route maps from A to B into the first migrating birds?

Introducing the brain
dhw: How does a half-second gap (which unsurprisingly feels like “immediate”) between finger prick and brain awareness prove the existence of a soul? I simply cannot understand the relevance of Libet’s experiment to the existence or non-existence of the soul...

DAVID: The soul attached to the brain is doing the immediate feeling, per Egnor.

Egnor wrote: But then we must drop the implicit belief that the soul “lives” in the brain (somewhere near the pineal gland, according to another philosopher, René Descartes). The soul lives where we live, where we act.
I suspect that you have no more idea than I have why Egnor tried to link Libet’s experiment with the soul.

Philosophy of science dead? Realism vs. empiricism
DAVID: I know God cannot be fully proved, as you are evidence, but strongly inferred from evidence, all of which confuses you, as you recognize evidence from obvious design.

dhw: Sorry, but if something can’t be “fully proved”, it can’t be proved. God is an unprovable conjecture, and we’d need to leave this world to prove his existence.

DAVID: Agreed, but in this world from NDE evidence.

I thought NDE evidence suggested that the soul entered a different world. Anyway, we’re still stuck with the fact that the God theory is no more provable than the multiverse theory, so I cordially invite you to go on discussing our conjectures even though all of them are unprovable.

Horizontal gene transfer: plant to insect pest
DAVID: Undoubtedly more of this type of transfer will be found, and virus is the best guess as the agent. Horizontal gene transfer is shown again to be a driver of evolutionary change. This may be another answer/reason to why viruses are present at all?

It may indeed. And if so, I think it will become harder and harder for you to solve the problem of theodicy if you argue that your God deliberately designed viruses to be the drivers of both good and bad evolutionary change (unless you think diseases like Covid-19 will turn out to be good for us – especially for those who have died.) If he exists and designed viruses, the different consequences of their behaviour would fit in far more easily with a free-for-all than with the tight control you always insist is exercised by a God who cares enough to try and correct the errors caused by his system.

ID explained
DAVID: ID simply accepts that obvious design in life forms indicates a designer at work. Many will admit in public writings it reinforces their belief in God, but they will never use God in their scientific papers on design. When dhw wonders if ID'ers support my theories, the answer is obviously no. I use their theories and plug God in. I am not limited by their self-imposed restraints about references to God as the designer. They refer to the need for a designing mind. I just give it a name.

I have never had a quarrel with the argument for intelligent design, and my objection to your theories has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence of God (concerning which I remain open-minded) but with the illogicality of your combined premises: that your God’s only purpose was to design humans, but evolution means he directly designed every life form etc, and all of them were “part of the goal of evolving humans”, although 99% of them had no connection with humans. I sincerely wonder if you will ever find any support among ID-ers or indeed among any believers for this combination of premises.