More "miscellany" (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 16, 2022, 09:12 (591 days ago) @ David Turell

Are we alone? and Rare earth hypothesis

DAVID: The forgotten point is only the Earth can allow us to appear. The rest of the universe exists for God's reasons with or without Has sparks of early life. We're off on a tangent of unknown possibilities.

dhw: We don’t know if the Earth is unique. You raised the interesting subject of other possibilities, and so I have asked pertinent questions about each of them. Your answers raise more questions, especially in relation to your theories about your God. Nobody knows the truth, but if you can’t find logical answers, maybe your theories are wrong!

DAVID: There are no logical or illogical answers. You are right, the Earth may not be unique. But the main issue was, if life is elsewhere would it disturb my beliefs. No, it wouldn't.

Nothing will, since you have fixed your mind on particular theories that make no sense to you, and refuse to consider alternatives. You have, for instance, proposed that “the seeds of life [bacteria] throughout the universe were God’s, not naturally appearing.” If they have not evolved into any other life form, I don’t think it’s out of order to ask why you think he would have put them there, especially when you claim that his one and only purpose in creating life was to design us and our food.

How E coli fights our system

DAVID: Yes, good or bad. All fight for survival.

dhw: Correct. But your God, if he exists, could always dabble if he felt like it. So which of the above alternatives are you choosing?

DAVID: God designs everything.

dhw: So do you think he designed E-coli to kill us, did he lose control, did he not care that they would kill us, or did he give them the freedom to fight for survival in their own way (= a free-for-all)?

DAVID: My view is God knew accidents would happen when E. coli ended up in a wrong place, but the brain He gave us would allow solutions to be created.

So he lost control, but thought we could do what he couldn’t do.

Back to theodicy:

DAVID: Hugh Ross would not accept your analysis, nor would I.

dhw: I know. Please explain why.

DAVID: The article clearly explains how viruses help life. You concentrate on the negative.

dhw: It is the negative that theodicy is concerned with.

DAVID: And the negative is huge or it is not huge is individual perception.

dhw: Hugeness is irrelevant. Theodicy tries to explain why an all-good God would create bad. Not how big is bad compared to good!

DAVID: And compares how much good there is to the small amount of bad.

I don’t know where you found this interpretation of the theodicy problem. Your solution, however, seems to be that an all-good God deliberately designed evil, but there isn’t much evil, so he’s all-good.

Vocalisation

DAVID:[…] […] what survival need made the changes appear in a naturally functioning evolutionary process? I see none.

dhw: […] The obvious “survival need” for changes in voice and brain is that with advancing intelligence, humans needed more efficient means of communication. […]

DAVID: […] I view God designing for future use, since such designs are well beyond species adaptations we perceive. It takes a complex mind to think through the design requirements.

dhw: Once the changes have been made, of course they will be used in the future! Your point is that the changes are caused by your God preprogamming them 3.8 billion years ago, or popping in to perform operations on a few sleeping homos, so they wake up able to talk. Mine is that the need for new sounds causes the relevant cell communities to make the necessary changes themselves. When the illiterate Indian women learned to read, it was found that this caused changes to their brains. The same process would have taken place in the relevant cell communities (voice and brain mechanisms) when our ancestors began to use new sounds. Cell communities change when they try to meet new requirements, not in anticipation of them.

DAVID: The Indian women used an already existing mechanism which isn't comparable to deleting a membrane.

dhw: It makes no difference whether there is a gain or a loss: the mechanism makes the changes necessary to meet new requirements.

DAVID: Deleting a membrane is not comparable to adding sone neuron connections by complexification.

It is comparable if we argue that cell communities make whatever changes are necessary in order to meet new requirements. Another variation is the example of hemispherectomy quoted under “Savannah theory fading” - Brain expansion


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