More miscellany Part ONE (General)

by dhw, Thursday, September 08, 2022, 11:36 (568 days ago) @ David Turell

PART ONE

DAVID: Wonderful. You've solved the puzzle of speciation. I fully understand human variability.

dhw: So you don’t think other animals might have varying degrees of intelligence? Nobody has “solved the puzzle of speciation”, but I take it you now accept the reasonableness of my explanation for the fact that our ancestors diverged from chimps.

DAVID: I'll stick with God designed bipedalism. Yours is reasonable Darwinism.

So you’ll stick with God operating on a group of chimps to change their backs, pelvises and legs before they descended from the trees, as opposed to a group of chimps either being forced from the trees through lack of food, or deciding to explore possible new sources of food. Thank you for accepting the reasonableness of the latter proposals.

New Zealand

DAVID: Our world is struggling to have enough food for everyone. That should tell you how important the ecosystems are.

dhw: Of course ecosystems are important! Every organism and ecosystem in the history of life has had to have food! That does not mean that every extinct organism and ecosystem in the history of life was an “absolute requirement” in preparation for us and our ecosystems! Please stop this silly dodging!

DAVID: Stop forgetting, the present giant ecosystems are a result of past evolution. Your dodge is to try and forget the past!

It is you who try to forget the past! Your dodge is to try and forget the single purpose you impose on your God, and the fact that the actions you impose on him (individual design of countless PAST life forms and ecosystems, most of which did NOT lead to us and our ecosystems) do not correspond to the single purpose you impose on him!

DAVID: God created everything, so your complaint is anti-God. He wanted everything that appeared to appear. Your dodge is from your agnosticism.

There is nothing anti-God in my complaint about your theories, which are so illogical that they “make sense only to God” and therefore not to you. If he wanted everything that appeared to appear, then quite clearly H. sapiens and our food were not the only things he wanted to appear. My logical theories about a possible God’s possible purposes and methods have nothing whatsoever to do with my agnosticism. Please stop pretending that my agnosticism invalidates my criticisms of your theories and invalidates the acknowledged logic of my theistic alternatives.

Whales and hippos

QUOTE: “The best they can do is suggest that when organisms live in similar environments, their evolution is constrained in such a way that they develop anatomical similarities that help them survive better.”

dhw: Not “constrained”. It is sheer common sense that if organisms are faced with similar problems, they will come up with similar solutions.

dhw: Do you agree?

DAVID: Constrained is correct. Your quote supports it.

I criticized the quote!

QUOTE: “… phenomenon of convergence presents fundamental problems for evolutionary biologists who continue to argue that life is historically contingent (contingent meaning it happened by chance and could just as easily have happened differently).”

dhw: A misleading definition: “contingent” also entails dependence on certain factors - in this case environmental changes. These may happen by chance. But some organisms adapt autonomously, and so maybe by extension the same autonomous mechanisms could also design innovations that improve chances of survival and lead to speciation. Not by chance!

dhw: Do you agree?

DAVID: No. God designs.

My point was that if intelligent cells designed the innovations, the innovations did not come about by chance. I didn’t ask if you agreed that cells do the designing.

dhw: If your [ID] buddies ignore the theory [cellular intelligence], that must be because they don’t know it, or they can’t argue against it.

DAVID: Or because it leads to nothing.

dhw: The theory that cells are intelligent leads to a completely different explanation of how evolution has taken place from Darwin’s theory and from the theory that every species has been individually designed by your God. Not exactly “nothing”, is it?

DAVID: It has never explained how cells came to function so intelligently, based on natural events.

It is concerned with how evolution takes place, and you refuse to consider cellular intelligence. But I have always allowed for your God as its designer. When you tell us God designed everything in order to produce us plus food, I do not re-open the question of how God came to exist. Please stick to the subject.


Complete thread:

 RSS Feed of thread

powered by my little forum