More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by David Turell @, Thursday, November 17, 2022, 19:14 (497 days ago) @ dhw

Human population reaches 8 million

DAVID: You don't understand how to think about God as I do. Everything will be illogical until you understand belief.

dhw: I object to your pretending that the real problem of food shortages somehow invalidates my criticisms of your illogical theories and degrades them into “complaints”. Your belief that you know how to think about God does not provide an answer to all the contradictions in your arguments.

DAVID: Your contradictions are your inability to understand how I view God. Everything we see in the process from Archaea to us was required to be done, because God DID IT. Your complaints are your illogical human analysis of how God evolved us.

dhw: What contradictions? I agree that I am just as unable as you are to understand why an all-powerful God who knows how to create whatever he wants to create, should create countless life forms that have no connection with the only life forms he wants to create. I would suggest that if God exists, whatever he did would have been what he WANTED to do (not what he had to do or was required to do).

Try this analysis of God thinking: He decides a new form is needed and understands the requirements for that design. He then fulfills that requirement.

dhw: If the dead ends were not required for us and our food, then it is pointless to claim that they WERE required, and so we should consider other reasons for their existence. That is not a complaint about history, but a complaint about your illogical interpretation of history and of your God’s possible purpose(s).

Dead ends are a natural event in all form of evolution. Stop distorting facts.


Land plant evolution required changes

DAVID: note my bolds. I expect God helped with the best design.

dhw: Yet more evidence that evolution takes place when life forms respond to changing conditions. In the past you have insisted that your God changed life forms in anticipation of changing conditions. Remember those poor pre-whales waiting with their flippers until the water arrived? 20-40 million years may be rapid by comparison with 3.8 billion years of life, but it’s a helluva long time in terms of your God anticipating future drought trouble and equipping plants to deal with it. What took him so long?

DAVID: God's timing is not ours. You are really asking if life started 3.8 bya why did it take so long to get to humans. That was God's timing.

dhw: I don’t have a problem with the time, since all three of my alternative theistic theories can allow for any length of time. My problem is the absurdity of your own theories: in this case, the idea that your God would have prepared plants in advance of the droughts, though the processes of adaptation must have been ongoing if they continued over 20-40 million years. But perhaps you could be more specific about how your God might have "helped with the best design" if you've changed your mind about the sequence of his interventions (i.e your design in preparation for new conditions, as opposed to my design in response to new conditions).

I simply accept all history is a result of God's designs which are alwsys the best designs


ANCIENT VIRUSES

DAVID: this is a discovery with still unknown meaning. It shows we were previously infected with pandemics and may have affected our evolution. Considering the issue of theodicy and 'nasty' viruses, we do not know how these guys fit. From a design standpoint, God may have used viruses to edit DNA changes. Time will tell.

dhw: Your comment on theodicy is very much to the point. Thank you.

Thank you


The weirdness of neutron stars

DAVID: until we figure it out, it will be approached as weird. And I'd better repeat my view. If God did it, it had to be there for reasons God felt were reasonable.

dhw: But since you can’t think of any such reasons – just as you can’t think of any reasons for dead ends – your theories of evolution (apart from those related to the complexities of life as evidence for design) are clearly not based on the power of reason.

The power of reason comes from accepting belief.


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