Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 04, 2021, 10:51 (1090 days ago) @ David Turell

We change ecosystems
DAVID: Giving up fossil fuels will create economic chaos.

dhw: So will the collapse of our ecosystem, and you have not even mentioned the cost in human suffering that this will cause. A gradual but worldwide transition from fossil fuels to less damaging sources of energy will create a different form of economy. Such a process need not be chaotic if humans cooperate instead of thinking solely in terms of what they have in their bank accounts.

DAVID: Nations are competitors. You exhibit wishful thinking.

Then in order to avoid unimaginable catastrophe, nations will have to follow the pattern of evolution, which progresses not solely through competition but also through cooperation. Neither you nor I will be around to see the outcome, but I can only hope that you are wrong.

Brain and body sizes
DAVID: So you accept material naturalism with no basis in fact, opposed to my approach as I use the facts of design complexity to propose a designing mind.[…]

dhw: […] But why do you keep pretending that my theory makes me a “materialist” and does not allow for a designing mind?

DAVID: That gives up control. Not my mind.

My proposal that your God might have designed a free-for-all does not make me a materialist and does not mean that I do not allow for a designing mind. I wish you would stop pretending that all my arguments against your illogical theories and in favour of logical alternatives stem from the fact that I am an agnostic, which you even pretend actually makes me an atheist. Why can’t you just stick to the arguments themselves?

A two-celled ancient fossil
dhw: Yet again, thank you for a fascinating article. Doesn’t such “convergence” suggest to you that if your God exists, his starting point was to design cells that could do their own designing, to enable them to adjust to different conditions?

DAVID: Thank you. Happy to present them. God's pre-planning designs allows using the same design again and again.

And according to you, every one of them is specially designed as “part of the goal of evolving [= specially designing] humans”. Doesn’t it make more sense to argue that different organisms will find similar solutions to similar problems? Only asking.