Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 25, 2021, 13:53 (1068 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: God's epigenetic mechanisms allow for simple adaptations that allow for cooperative solutions.

dhw: You will have to forgive me for my denseness, but I find the switch from “intelligent information” to “epigenetic mechanisms”, and from “instructs” to “allows for”, slightly bewildering when my first question could easily be answered by “yes” or “no”. Let me try again, but this time I’ll be more direct. Disregarding the autonomy of human free will, do you believe that your God either preprogrammed or dabbled all instances of cooperation and all solutions to all problems throughout life’s history? If not, do you believe that he gave organisms the autonomous ability to cooperate and solve problems? If it’s the latter, but you want to limit this ability to “simple adaptations”, do you then agree that this ability denotes a “simple” form of autonomous intelligence?

My state4ment is quite clear. The way organisms make simple adaptations is through epigenetic mechanisms. Part of God's design. Those adaptations are therefore independent of God.

Some extremophiles use radioactivity
DAVID: Back to the same concept. Life must have a continuous energy supply to survive. Further this system may be the way life started.

dhw: I don’t think anyone would deny that life needs energy. And we are certainly back to the same concept: that these micro-organisms appear to have the wherewithal to survive by changing those parts of themselves that need to be changed in order to meet different requirements. This, I suggest, may have set the pattern for the whole of evolution, and I agree that it may be the way life started.

They do it through God's designed mechanisms.

Milky Way has a twin
DAVID: This tells us a galaxy like ours exists and there must be others, and they could contain Earths. It doesn't disturb me if God is sponsoring life/humans in many places.

dhw: If God exists, I’d find it a bit strange that he would confine his interests to a single planet, let alone a single species plus food supply. One can’t help asking why else he would create the billions of galaxies. On the other hand, the more galaxies there are, the more Earths there will be, and the more Earths there are, the greater the chances of life eventually emerging in its simplest forms (see "extremophiles"). And the more Earths there are, the greater the chances of simple forms starting the process of cooperation which eventually leads to evolution as we know it. But don’t get me wrong: I am still stuck on my fence!

That's OK. We agree multiple Earths are possible, even probable.