Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Friday, October 15, 2021, 12:06 (1133 days ago) @ David Turell

Cosmologic philosophy: inflation, no Big Bang

QUOTE: "Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began.”

A truly enlightening article. Without any of the complex scientific reasons, this is the view I have been championing throughout our discussions, so thank you for presenting it to us.

DAVID: I've only given his conclusion, not all the early considerations. The materialistic problem remains: what existed before all of this inflation/Bang? Something had to. Something made this happen: either material for a universe always existed in a different but transmutable form or it was created by an eternal mind who/which could engineer all the necessary variables precisely to allow life to appear. The additional need for fine-tuning makes a great case for a required God.

My agnosticism is based fairly and squarely on those two possibilities (with a vague form of panpsychism in between): either an infinite material universe producing an infinite number of combinations, eventually producing the one that will provide conditions for life and for life itself, or an eternal mind or minds as you describe. I find each of these equally impossible to believe in, even though one or the other must be closer to the truth (with panpsychism providing an uneasy compromise).

Survival
DAVID: The quote [see bold below] means, as you know, means survival dos not produce the next species in evolution, God does.

dhw: It means no such thing. If your God produced all the new species, and specially designed their new mechanisms (e.g. flippers for legs) to improve their chances of survival, then he did his designing to ensure that the changes which led to speciation enabled the new species to survive. That is the connection between survival and new species which your bolded statement [...] denies.

DAVID: Survival does not speciate, God does, my only important point. Of course God wants survival of His new designs.

And according to your theory, the changes which he designs and which lead to speciation (e.g. legs into flippers plus all the other changes to pre-whales) are made to improve chances of survival. It is therefore absurd to claim that “survival has nothing to do with the appearance of new species.” However, you are determined to ignore your earlier remark, so we may as well drop the subject.