More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, November 15, 2022, 11:40 (500 days ago) @ David Turell

Pete the opossum

DAVID: Your God doesn't want to help us.

dhw: I don’t know what this comment has to do with the intelligence of our fellow creatures, but it’s very significant. Even your beloved Adler puts your God’s interest in us at 50/50. You, on the other hand, who regard enjoyment, interest, experimentation, new ideas etc. as too “humanized” to be acceptable, think that he would help us if we were threatened by an asteroid. How astonishingly human and humane of him!

DAVID: I fully accept that we are on our own to stop asteroids. God gave us the brains to do it.

Your original comment was: “If our God is a deist, we are on our own. If he is a theist, He will help.” Of course it’s not your God who would be a deist or theist – it’s you. And in view of your belief that he is too kind to have specially designed murderous viruses, and did his best to provide us with antidotes for all the diseases that were not his fault, I assumed you were a theist. My apologies. I shall try to remember in future that you fully accept deism.

Cornelius Hunter

QUOTE: So, what is evolution? In other words, what is core to the theory — and not forfeitable? It’s naturalism. Period. That is the only thing required of evolutionary theory. And naturalism is a religious requirement, not a scientific one.

dhw: Without a definition of naturalism, this seems to me to be totally meaningless. [For definitions and the argument against Cornelius Hunter’s approach, see yesterday’s post.] I would suggest that the “core “ of evolutionary theory is the belief that evolution is “the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms” (Penguin Dictionary of Science).

DAVID: I agree with the definition of evolution, but the force behind evolution is to be debated.

If by the “force” you mean your God or “natural” as opposed to ”supernatural” forces, then I agree.

QUOTE: There is no such thing as a settled theory of evolution. On that point, textbook orthodoxy is simply false.

dhw: (…) I don’t know what he means by “textbook orthodoxy”. Who decides what is “orthodox”? The very fact that nobody has yet solved the mystery of HOW organisms speciate, let alone how the mechanisms came into existence, has led to different approaches. But the “core” remains the same, as defined above.

DAVID: The orthodoxy is don't let God's toe in the doorway of evolutionary theory.

I didn’t know that atheism was now “orthodoxy”. This will come as a surprise to the millions of folk who believe in God and evolution, including the Catholic Church, most Protestants, Liberal Jews, many Muslims, and indeed many scientists. And we should never forget that Darwin himself was an agnostic, and it’s a bit tough on him to include him in the atheist “orthodoxy”!

Human population reaches 8 million

DAVID: Both God and we know how important this problem will be. God anticipated it by providing us with a current huge bush of life, which can be an adequate ecosystem for us if managed properly. dhw will scurry to agree, as he has done in the past, and immediately complain about all the necessary dead ends in evolution that acted as ecosystems to feed the burgeoning bush on the way to current size.

I wish you would stop making these silly comments, as they do you no credit. The “burgeoning bush on the way to current size” could only consist of those life forms that evolved into current life forms. The dead ends did not lead to the current bush, and were only “necessary” for those past life forms which did not lead to us and our food supply. You are of course free to use the very real problems described in these posts as propaganda for your own religious beliefs, but please don’t use them to divert attention away from the illogicality of those beliefs by pretending that this is merely a complaint by me!

Introducing the brain: the claustrum

QUOTES: "The brain is the most complex system in the known universe […….]"As the most highly connected structure in the brain, the claustrum is a window into the enigma of the brain, the mind." (David’s bold]

One experiment used modern neuroscience approaches to turn off the claustrum in conscious mice. The mice did not lose consciousness and kept running around normally.”

Please note that mice are conscious. We have evolved from earlier animals which also had brains, and consciousness is not confined to humans. Our difference lies only in our degree of consciousness. As for the claustrum, once again we have cell communities cooperating,
but we are clearly no nearer to discovering the “seat of consciousness”.


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