Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 24, 2021, 17:54 (1246 days ago) @ dhw

A.N. Whitehead
DAVID: An evolving God is not 'inactive'. You are confused because of your view of whom God might be.

dhw: An evolving, “becoming” God is the exact opposite of your all-powerful, all-knowing, all-controlling, all-creating God, so why is Whitehead’s God equal to yours, whereas an experimenting or learning God is weak and namby-pamby?

Perception. Whitehead's God might be evolving, but His works are still the works of my God. No word of experimenting or allowing secondhand evolution with the inmates in charge of the asylum.

Insect smell receptors

DAVID: How much conceptual thought does AI do? Odor recognition is analysis, nothing more.

dhw: Analysis and “endowing patterns with meaning through learning and experience” are hallmarks of natural intelligence.

As a surface analysis. Intelligently-run automaticity looks exactly the same. The same 50/50

Plant cell regulators

DAVID: And babies are born without immunities, but with an immune system that can learn automatically to fight any invaders. […] God has arranged that open pores in the baby's intestine allow the giant IGG to enter the blood stream for that period and then they close because of their inappropriate size. Solution first. Irreducible complexity requiring a designer.

DAVID: The rudiments of our immune system came through God's evolutionary process.

dhw: They certainly came through the evolutionary process, so what is all this about God arranging the human baby’s solutions in advance of the problems? The human baby’s immune system is the result of a long evolutionary process in which problems arose, and solutions were found and passed on.

As usual you skip over the complexity of the arrangement for newborn protection system. Not by chance edvolution.

Cosmic filaments spin

dhw: I have no doubt that if God exists, he knew what he was doing. […] The cosmologists don’t seem to mention God. We all know that effects must have a cause, and that will be true even if there is no God. And so if the cosmologists do find the cause, I doubt very much that all of them will then cry “Hallelujah!” and rush off to church.

DAVID: You know science uses science and not God. The complexity of God's works requires Him as designer.

dhw: The question is WHY your God would do all these strange things if his one and only purpose was to design humans and their lunch. Even if scientists discover the cause of the spinning effect, it will not answer dhw, who “wants to know why God [did] so many strange things” that apparently have no connection with humans and their lunch.

The bold is your usual guesswork 'something might be wrong' or 'why do we need it?' God has his reasons, and bit by bit we figure them out.

Jupiter and Saturn have fevers
DAVID: The Earth is very, very special, but hope springs eternal that we inhabit something that is not so special. Why?

dhw: I would put it down to our natural curiosity rather than hope. And my own curiosity makes me wonder why, if God exists and his only purpose was to design humans and their lunch, he also designed billions and billions of other galaxies extant and extinct, which apparently have no life but simply exist until they stop existing.

As above God has all the answers, and we try to figure them out, while you remain a doubting Thomas