Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Monday, March 29, 2021, 14:16 (1125 days ago) @ David Turell

Possums and penguins

dhw: Now please tell us how you think your God informs every possum about the length of time needed to play dead.

DAVID: God coded the instinct into possum DNA

dhw: And how about his methods of passing information to […] every migrating bird?

DAVID: Change in genome coding.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Either or, is all I can state.

That does not tell us “how”.

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

dhw: 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.
dhw: I suspect that you have no more idea than I have why Egnor tried to link Libet’s experiment with the soul.

DAVID: I've answered above, the soul working with/through the brain.

So you and Egnor believe in the existence of a soul, and the soul feels the physical pain immediately, while the brain feels it half a second later. Someone who doesn’t believe in a soul will suggest that the brain feels the pain half a second after the finger has been pricked. Please tell me what Egnor is trying to prove with this. Or just drop the subject.

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?

dhw: 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. 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.

DAVID: Your comment does not explain God's many corrective editing mechanisms.

Your comment does not explain why he deliberately designed bacteria and viruses that would cause untold suffering. Earlier, with regard to the errors caused by the system he designed, you also had him unable to correct some of the errors and leaving it to us clever humans to try and do it. For some reason, he wanted to challenge us! I suggest that your insistence on your God’s deliberate creation of disease-causing bacteria and viruses, and the non-correction of errors, make it harder and harder for you to solve the problem of theodicy.

ID explained

dhw: 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.

DAVID: You know, full well, all ID-ers do is claim a designer creates life and evolving species. Repeat your irrational complaint all you wish.

I do know that full well, and I simply wonder if there is ANYONE apart from you who believes in the bolded theory. So far you have agreed that neither ID-ers nor even Adler support it.