Return to David's theory of evolution PART 2 (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, May 26, 2022, 11:01 (701 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My sense of it all butts heads with your rigid agnosticism. I criticized your human form of God enough in the past not to repeat it again. Above and elsewhere I have described my concept of a designing mind. That mind may know and understand human emotions and desires, since that mind created us, but may have no human emotions itself. 50/50 still means yes or no! (dhw's bold)

dhw: Correct. And if there is a 50/50 chance of a yes, it is absurd to reject a theory solely on the grounds that you believe the answer is no.

DAVID: I've chosen a logical side that tells me complex design without a designing mind is impossible.

That is not the 50/50 we are talking about, which is the possibility that your God has human thought patterns and emotions. (See bold above.) Please stop dodging.

Source of information

dhw: The whole article supports the argument that life is too complex to have arisen by chance. If you like to say that life requires too much “information” to have arisen by chance, I really couldn’t care less. Yet again: I accept the logic of this argument, so please stop dodging behind it whenever I challenge your illogical theory of evolution.

DAVID: My theory of evolution fits exactly how a designer would have done it, as based on the actual history. I have explained an answer to each of your objections, but they don't satisfy your constant doubt.

Your various theories of evolution have led you to make the following statements:
“What I cannot explain is why God chose evolution over direct creation. Why can’t you accept that explanation?”

I’m sorry, but I do not regard your inability to explain your theory as an explanation.
On the question of why he designed countless life forms and foods that had no connection with humans and our food: “God makes sense only to himself.”

No, I am not satisfied with the explanation that your theory only makes sense to God, or with your telling me elsewhere that if I want answers to my questions concerning the illogicality of your theory, I should go and ask God.

Second article:
DAVID: Highly technical article. I've plucked out the meat. T repeat the old point: life uses provided information to run its systems. That life had to have an original source of useful information when life started.

dhw: It’s amazing the extent to which some people can cloak the simplest of arguments in masses of jargon to make it sound more scientific and impressive. The “meat” remains the fact that the mechanisms which enable materials to live, reproduce and evolve are so complex that it requires blind faith to believe they could have come together by chance.

DAVID: Only a rigid blind faith in chance could believe in the current results of evolution as coming from chance.

Agreed. And we don’t need masses of jargon to make that point. Nor should we ignore the fact that a rigid blind faith is also required for belief in the existence of an unknown, hidden, all-powerful, sourceless mind, capable of creating a universe and all the intricacies of living cells, and which has simply been there for ever and ever.

DAVID: Ed Feser again:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-hollow-universe-of-modern-physics.html#more

Pure physics
QUOTE […] "And it is no less fallacious to infer from the success of physics that there is nothing more to material reality, or at least nothing more worth knowing, than what physics has to say about it (even if a lot of people who like to think of themselves as pretty smart are guilty of this fallacy).

dhw: Here is another piece on the same subject:
The limitations of science

QUOTE: “Science can only concern itself with the material world as we know it. Science cannot speculate on matters beyond the scope of what can be tried and tested, and so by definition any belief in a non-physical world must be unscientific. But unscientific does not mean unreal or non-existent” etc. etc.

dhw: You may be surprised at the source of this little article, which is my "Agnostic’s Brief Guide to the Universe”. You do not need to be a believer to understand arguments that support belief, just as you do not need to be an atheist to understand disbelief.

DAVID: By definition what is outside of science is the supernatural. The bold I just put in from Feser is what you point out above. we can never get to actually proving beyond what we can measure materially in science. For me I have logically accepted that such demonstrated complexity in living biochemistry requires a designing mind, source unknown. For me nothing else makes any sense.

Understood. I was merely pointing out that I had made the same point as Feser some 15 years ago, and you do not need to be a believer to make it.