Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 15, 2021, 11:19 (1255 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If his one and only purpose was to create humans and their lunch, it makes no sense that he would have specially designed millions of life forms and lunches that had no connection with humans. STOP DODGING!

DAVID: God's goal was to produce us at the end of the evolutionary process. That is my solid logical position.

It would be logical were it not for the fact that you insist he directly created millions of other life forms, econiches, lifestyles, natural wonders etc, and 99% of these had no connection with humans. Hence my alternative proposal that if we were indeed his goal, the rest might be the result of experimentation in order to find the right combination.

DAVID: I have pointed out in the past your illogical complaint about God's method brings up the suggestion implied by you that God should have directly created us.

If we were his only purpose, and he was capable of directly designing every other life form, then there is no reason to believe that he could not have directly created us plus food supply. But of course I’m not saying what he should have done. I’m questioning your rigid and incompatible beliefs concerning what he wanted to do and what he did.

DAVID: Even the Genesis Eden story realizes a direct creation requires a garden filled with food supply. The huge bush of life is required to support our current population. Your complaint is the DODGE.

Of course we need food. But 99% of the life forms and food supplies you tell us he designed individually had nothing to do with humans! Why don’t you listen to yourself? “The current bush of food is NOW for humans NOW. There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms.” “Extinct life has no role in current time.”

Ingenious research tricks
DAVID: Separating origin of life and evolution of life is a debating crutch to avoid the issues involved in a debate about God.

dhw: […] God inventing cellular intelligence to run evolution is just as theistic as God dabbling or providing a 3.8-billion-year old computer programme for the whole of life’s history.

DAVID: Wrong. Initial life is a speciation!!! You like to slice and dice processes like evolution. Same DODGE.

In my theory, the first cells (possibly designed by your God) would have contained the mechanisms for evolution (reproduction, heredity, potential for variation) plus the intelligence required to use the mechanism and change structures to meet or exploit new conditions. The very first cells were the very first species, if you like, but evolution is the history of all their changes. You claim that my theory is an attempt to avoid a debate about God. It’s an attempt to explain how evolution works, and it allows for God. What is “wrong”, and what have I dodged?

Planets with polar orbits
DAVID: Obviously all parts of the universe are not the same. Should they necessarily be similar? It is certainly possible some processes of evolution of the universe can have different results.

And all apparently specially designed for the purpose of designing humans plus their lunch?

The spinning universe
DAVID: We keep finding new mysteries in God's creation to study. Day and night are good for us living creatures who have to sleep. Is that the reason? That idea makes us very important.

Important to whom? Are you now saying that your God specially designed billions of galaxies extant and extinct, and made all of them spin so that humans and their lunch could sleep better?

Magic embryology
DAVID: We can see what works, but do not know how it works or why it works. Our knowledge of genomics is still on the outside looking in.

And from the outside, it looks as if the components are acting and cooperating intelligently. You grant that it’s 50/50, but you know it’s not.

Introducing the brain
QUOTE: In this region, many of the stem cells are in a quiescent state, sensing signals in the environment that stimulate them to awaken and transform into new nerve cells.

Again I wonder if the flexibility and versatility of stem cells might not be the key to the way cell communities speciate as they interact with environmental conditions.

Consciousness: free will exists
QUOTE: Experiments spanning the 1960s and 1980s measured brain signals noninvasively and led many neuroscientists to believe that our brains make decisions before we do—that human actions were initiated by electrical waves that did not reflect free, conscious thought.

I note the separation between “brain” and “we”. I imagine some neuroscientists think “we” ARE our brain. Personally, I don’t see how the speed of the electrical waves solves anything anyway. The argument about free will is not confined to the speed of electrical waves in relation to decisions taken. It revolves around all the factors that influence our decisions but are beyond our control, including our brains, bodies, heredity, upbringing, environment, chance events etc, We have discussed this many times.