More "miscellany" (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, May 17, 2022, 08:09 (682 days ago) @ David Turell

New cell

DAVID: The bold is from your humanized version of a possible God. My conceived God fits my reasoning with a fully logical argument. You need to come over to my view of God.

dhw: “Humanization” dealt with (ad nauseam) elsewhere. Once again, your “conceived” God’s only purpose was to design humans (plus food bush), but he designed countless life forms and bushes that did not lead to humans (plus food bush). You don’t know why.

DAVID: Why ignore what I tell you? The huge bush all long is necessary food for all. One branch leads to humans as it did.

Why ignore your own logic? Past food bushes were necessary for past organisms, the vast majority of which did NOT lead to humans and our food bush. It is therefore absurd to say that they were all preparation for and part of your God’s one and only goal “to evolve [= design] humans” and their food.

dhw: Why should I come over to a view that is so manifestly illogical when there are alternative, logical explanations of life’s history which you can only reject on the grounds that they entail human thought patterns, though you agree that your God might have thought patterns similar to ours?

DAVID: You just can't give up your illogical view that your god must have human emotions.

Not “must”, but might – as you have agreed – and there is nothing illogical in the possibility that the possible creator of all things might wish to endow humans with some of his own thought patterns and emotions, since he could hardly have created them without knowing what they were.

Sturdy bird nests

DAVID: on the issue of nesting, birds are smarter than we are. It is not just the knots of the weaverbird. I still feel God helped.

dhw: I suggest that it’s not just birds that are smarter than we are in their own special way, but also countless other life forms including bacteria, and also including cell communities that combine their smartness to design evolutionary innovations. If God exists, I would suggest that his “help” would have consisted in designing the intelligence of the cells of which all life forms are made.

DAVID: That intelligence is from God's instruction-containing genome.

dhw: My proposal is that the (perhaps God-given) intelligence does NOT consist of a book of instructions for every innovation, lifestyle, natural wonder, problem solution, bird’s nest, survival strategy etc. in the history of life, but is an autonomous ability which organisms use in order to cope with or exploit the conditions and situations in which they find themselves.

DAVID: Animal thought processes are in God-given brains which allow them to have purposeful actions but not conceptualization as we have. They cannot envision new survival techniques.

You are deliberately choosing terms that denote abstract thinking (“conceptualization”, “envision”), whereas it is obvious that survival techniques are created as direct responses to immediate, concrete situations. Every kind of nest would have been built originally by birds working out how to use the existing properties of the materials available to them. I find it very hard to believe that every species of bird was provided with an instruction manual on how to build its nest.

Biomimetics

QUOTE: The seed pod of the maple tree helps design better drone:

DAVID: the original designer is much better than we are.

Again I find it hard to understand why your God would have specially designed the seed pod of the maple tree if his one and only aim was to design H. sapiens and our food. But I have no difficulty understanding alternative theistic theories, e.g. your God’s enjoyment of creation, or his giving cells the autonomous intelligence with which to design their own methods of survival…


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