Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 30, 2021, 19:45 (1332 days ago) @ dhw

Possums and penguins

dhw: You keep asking me how the possum communicates his trick to other possums, so I’m asking how your God codes the genome. Do you think he inserted a possum-play-dead programme into the first cells 3.8 billion years ago, or did he pop in to perform an operation on the genome of a group of possums?

Either way is logical for God to code behavior.

Introducing the brain

DAVID: The soul operates as in the bold is what Egnor feels he proves. You don't have to accept it.

dhw: So we must simply take it for granted that we have a soul, and he is merely proving that the soul feels pain immediately, and the brain feels it half a second later. Oh well, let’s leave it at that then.

How else to explain the time delay in the brain?

Horizontal gene transfer: plant to insect pest
DAVID: Your comment does not explain God's many corrective editing mechanisms.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I've admitted I have no complete explanation or solution for Theodicy problems. I think future research will solve much of it.

dhw: Fair enough. Nobody has a “complete explanation” for any of our main subjects of discussion. All we can do is discuss the possibilities. But I must confess, I prefer possibilities that hang together logically to those that either contradict themselves or rely solely on hopes that future research will confirm their inherent preconceptions.

As in the past future research clears up problem issues.

Tectonics and environment
QUOTE: "The first eukaryote cells – which today make up every plant, animal and fungi today – evolved at the very beginning of the Boring Billion. Then, around 1.6 billion years ago, plants diverged from animals and fungi and 1.5 billion years ago animals and fungi split.”

dhw: It’s an amazing thought that all animal and plant life evolved from cooperation between cells, and that we ourselves are built of the same materials.

All developed by design from the designer.

DAVID: (under “Plant responses to drought”: Animals came on Earth first and plants followed. It looks s if plants borrowed an animal protein controller to use for their own preservation. Perhaps God, the designer, makes His job easier by reusing His designs.

dhw: Please note that yet again we have evolutionary development for the purpose of survival (“to use for their own preservation”). Perhaps this is an example of how, over millions of years, every cell community has intelligently selected and used information gathered by other cell communities in the process that has resulted in the vast diversity of living forms past and present, including humans.

Using information that exists runs the process of living, and new forms are based on new information. The issue the source of the new information, more complex than the old info. I choose God.