Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Sunday, October 03, 2021, 08:52 (938 days ago) @ David Turell

Survival
DAVID: My point is God designs evolution stage by stage. He is the driver.

dhw: And my point is that even if this were true, you yourself keep telling us that “new species are designed by God to ensure future survival following their appearance”. If that is his purpose, I suggest that the changes that lead to speciation and hence to evolution are driven by his desire to ensure their survival. It is therefore absurd to claim that “survival has nothing to do with the appearance of new species”.

DAVID: That still makes God the driver.

And the motive that drives him is to ensure future survival. So how does that come to mean that “survival has nothing to do with the appearance of new species”?

Reductionism
DAVID: Since biological design is so intricate it requires a designer. Since there was a start to reality in our BB from nothing it requires a cause, and therefore an eternal mind.

dhw: But that is not the problem, as you well know. An even greater mystery than biological design is that of an “eternal mind” that is simply “there”, had no origin, and yet is capable of creating a universe and life and conscious beings like ourselves. Unimaginable.

DAVID: I guess that agnosticism requires a lack of imagination.

If you can imagine an eternal, unknown, sourceless, undesigned mind capable of creating a whole universe and life and conscious beings like ourselves, although consciousness requires a designer, why shouldn’t someone else imagine an eternal, sourceless, undesigned universe of materials and energy that produces an infinite number of combinations, one of which eventually leads to conditions suitable for life, and eventually to life and to consciousness?

Your gut has a big brain
DAVID: We eat, we defecate, all without having to think about it. The proper nutrients are absorbed. This developed in evolution without interspecies or intraspecies conflict, which Darwinism favors as causing evolution. Why is it there? By design.

dhw: I have no idea why you have brought Darwin into this, but since you have, let me remind you that Lynn Margulis proposed that cooperation was at least as important to evolution as conflict, and she believed in cellular intelligence. The brainy gut is a prime example of how intelligent cells cooperate in order to design functioning communities. (It is possible that your God gave them their intelligence.)

DAVID: I'll accept your possibility about God.

Good. You can hardly accept the possibility that your God gave them their intelligence without accepting the possibility that they are intelligent.