Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Thursday, June 10, 2021, 13:41 (1052 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If God created the universe and life, why shouldn't He be allowed to run evolution? Your God is god-like now and then.

dhw: If God exists, he can do what he likes. That doesn't mean his one purpose was to design H. sapiens, and therefore he designed millions of organisms “de novo”, 99% of which had no connection with H. sapiens. Dodge, dodge, dodge!

DAVID: 'Dodge, dodge, dodge' is my belief!!!

Not exactly the most productive way of holding a discussion.

Clear evidence of common descent
dhw: You continually talk about the gaps between species (there is no fossil record), and try to use them as evidence that only God could have designed the new organs/organisms. “De novo” entails a jump, not a continuation!

DAVID: I'll repeat. Your argument is support for God, Who is required to jump the gaps.

dhw: It's not my argument! It's you who claim that because there is no fossil record of every stage of every organism, God must have created species “de novo”. That means you believe evolution was NOT a continuous process of common descent.

DAVID: It is continuous if God designs each stage creating the appearance of natural common descent.

But according to you he doesn’t. That’s why you harp on about the Cambrian. All you can talk about is the gaps in the fossil record as evidence that organisms did not descend from their predecessors but had to be created de novo, and only your God can create species de novo. It boils down to you saying that the absence of fossils proves that God designed new species de novo. It doesn’t. Nor does it prove that all organisms descended from earlier organisms. It doesn’t. It proves nothing. Although I do believe in common descent, and can find a logical reason for the gaps, even this leaves wide open the question of God’s existence and the role he would have played in evolution.

dhw: I didn’t know Gould was a proponent of Creationism.

DAVID: Relax, it is fact Gould made much of the gaps.

dhw: His point was that evolution is not slow and steady but proceeds in fits and starts. How does this come to mean that your God created all species “de novo” in order to design you and me?

DAVID: Nature didn't do the de novo designs.

How about answering the question? And they are not “the” de novo designs. It is your belief that the designs were de novo. As above, some of us believe in common descent.

Differing star nurseries
DAVID: this will only add to dhw's confusion as to why God created this universe, which is not uniform everywhere. We still don't have many answers about the mysteries we observe. The simplest approach is to accept God's doings and then figure out why.

dhw: Hardly my “confusion” if you can’t understand it yourself. Of course the simplest approach if you can’t find a logical explanation is to cling to your rigid beliefs. Let me know when you’ve figured out why, and then I’ll stop questioning your rigid beliefs.

DAVID: My so-called rigid belief is to simply accept God knows what He is doing and it takes our years and years of research to figure it out.

I have absolutely no doubt that if God exists, he knows what he is doing. But why should I accept your rigid belief that what he did was individually design billions of galaxies and millions of life forms etc., and that he did so for the sole purpose of designing you and me (plus our lunch)?

Blood clotting
QUOTE: The workhorses to stem bleeding are platelets -- tiny 2-micrometer cells in the blood in charge of making the initial plug.

DAVID: My question is how did unguided evolution invent such a critical but totally controlled process?

dhw: Every innovation would have required continuous solving of new problems. The common thread in this process is cells finding the solutions. You claim they were all preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, or alternatively your God was always there to deliver new instructions when needed. A theistic alternative is that he gave cells the wherewithal to figure out their own solutions.

DAVID: To have controlled clotting all stop and start parts had to be designed together.

I don’t know enough about the evolution of blood and, especially, its precursors to discuss the subject. That is why my comment was a generalization about cells finding solutions to problems as they arise – as opposed to every problem and solution having already been preprogrammed.