More "miscellany" (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 26, 2022, 14:47 (703 days ago) @ David Turell

STEM CELLS

DAVID: The operation is changing DNA code. And certainly flippers are an adaptation for water.

dhw: So he does operate. Let’s pin it down. Do you think your God changed the DNA code before pre-whales entered the water, or do you think that the interaction between legs and water resulted in a change to the DNA code?

DAVID: The only fossils we see are mostly flippered and fully flippered. God changed DNA in stages.

So as part of his one and only goal to design humans and their food, he performed stage-by-stage operations on pre-whales to continue improving their chances of survival in water. All planned from the beginning of life?

Our rare solar system

DAVID: Sorry, why won't you come to understand I cannot explain God. I can only see His productions and therefore His underlying purposes. I accept His methods. He intervenes to change course.

dhw: -[…] If your God “intervenes” to change the course of his own creating, then quite clearly he did not have everything planned right from the start. This would tie in very neatly with two of my alternative theories: he was experimenting in order to achieve the goal you have “guessed” (humans who would admire his work and have a relationship with him), or he kept getting new ideas as he went along.

DAVID: What you miss is the science writer interpreted God as intervening so 'intervention' is a human interpretation of God's actions, which may have been exactly what God planned all along.

All theories about God, including his existence, are human interpretations. I do not understand how a God who designs vast numbers of solar systems and life forms can “change course” in order to produce Earth and humans, if he had planned Earth and humans from the very beginning. “Intervention” suggests that your God did not create the billions of solar systems, or if he did, he suddenly had a brand new idea which made him “change course”.

DAVID: Skipping to your first second-guessing of God: God knows why He made an entire universe to house us. I don't need to provide logic just for you, I accept God knew exactly what He had to do.

“Had to do”? Yet again you have your creator of all things being forced by his own laws to act in a certain way in order to do what he wanted to do. You have formed a theory and, as usual, you mistake your theory for fact. If God exists, then he would have done what he wanted to do, not what he “had to do”. It seems to me that the whole point of all our discussions is to try to find logical explanations for history as we know it. You embrace logic when it comes to explaining the complexities of life as evidence of a designer, but you turn your back on it when it makes your theories so illogical that you can only explain them by saying you can’t explain them. NB I offer logical alternative theories, but the very fact that they are different should make you realize that I do not regard them as facts, whereas you present your own theories as if they were facts, and then you get in a muddle. (See the other thread for examples.)

Modulating synapses

dhw: I’m sorry, I know you want to highlight the wonders of the brain, and I do not wish in any way to minimize them. I just cannot accept that autism and schizophrenia plus all the diseases caused by “mistakes” are “classic examples of careful design for precise control”. We are back to the problem of theodicy!

DAVID: Caused by our living system that works, since we are all alive despite molecular mistakes.

dhw: And the mistakes cause untold suffering and death. I just cannot see how “precise control” can include “mistakes”. Sorry.

DAVID: Our biochemistry which creates life requires nanosecond reactions by free-floating molecules which are free to make mistakes. A total control system would be too cumbersome to work at the necessary speeds required, a necessary compromise. God could not make a better system with the limits required. Not God's fault.

I am not disputing your description of the system as it is. However, I have no more idea than you have of what your all-powerful God, who created all things from scratch, is capable of, but I find it hard to believe that he would have created something resulting in mistakes he didn’t want and couldn’t control, even if he tried. Therefore I can only conclude that what he created did NOT contain what you call these uncontrollable “mistakes”, but that he deliberately gave his creations what you have elsewhere called “free will” (in this case “free-floating molecules”) in order to ensure variety. This idea can be expanded to the whole of evolution, the higgledy-piggledy history of which I suggest is the result of the same freedom, although of course if God designed the system, he would always have been free to “intervene” if, for instance, he suddenly had a new idea.


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