More "miscellany" PART TWO (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 06, 2022, 12:48 (479 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO

Brain changes

dhw: Raup’s proposal makes perfect sense. But your God apparently designed every species of dinosaur as required preparation for us humans plus our food, only to see the majority wiped out by bad luck. So much for his total control! But yes, the bird line survived. Evolution works by one species turning into another. New species are not created by the extinction of species that lead nowhere.

DAVID: But their necessary extinction makes room for the improved models:

Your God specially designed life forms that were irrelevant to his purpose, so that he could get rid of them because he’d only left enough room for life forms that would develop into those that WERE relevant to his purpose. (See theoretical thread.) If only you’d been there at the time, you could have told him there was no need to design the dead ends in the first place! Furthermore, your apparent agreement with Raup doesn't even credit your God with making his unnecessary designs disappear, because that was simply a matter of bad luck.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance

DAVID: We do have a free-for-all. Everyone is eating every one else, because living requires daily food intake.

dhw: Of course all organisms need food and it’s a free-for-all. But if survival is a free-for-all, and non-survival is just bad luck, does it not make perfect sense that your God – if he exists and is all-powerful – did not want total control of evolution?

DAVID: His designed free-for-all, dog-eat-dog is His own designed result!! Full control.

You’ve sort of got the message. If a free-for-all was his intention (and he designed all the mechanisms for a free-for-all), then it was his intention not to have full control. Agreement at last!;-)

Strange brain tendrils

DAVID: That we evolved from tiny mammals after the dinosaurs left allows us to use mouse brains for research to explain our own.

dhw: Yes indeed. And that is why we should never underestimate the ability of our fellow animals to devise their own strategies, lifestyles and natural wonders.

DAVID: They have to live.

If they can. And I am suggesting (theistic version) that your God gave them the means to devise their own independent strategies for living. Some succeed, and some fail. If your God had wanted them all to live, there would have been no failures, but according to your weird and wonderful theory, he specially designed every successful strategy, and then made sure that any of his especially designed life forms that had no connection with what he really wanted to design would disappear because he had specially designed them so that he could get rid of them. (Or - as per Raup - he could rely on "bad luck" to get rid of them.)

The danger of solar flairs.

DAVID: Let's try again to have you understand God: Everything we have, know about, see, read about are God's creations. He is all-powerful, knows what He wishes to produce, knows how to produce it, and therefore everything He produced was required for successful completion of each creation. Want to twist that logic again ??

dhw: I do not believe that our literature, architecture, rockets to the moon etc. are God’s creations. I do not believe that the weaverbird’s nest, the opossums’s play-dead strategy, bird migration, cuttlefish camouflage, ant farming etc are God’s creations. I don’t have a problem with the concept of an all-powerful God who knows what he wishes to produce and how to produce it. These attributes fit in perfectly with the free-for-all you have described, and by extension with the free-for-all that would result from his giving the first forms of life the ability to design their own means of survival (thus explaining all the dead ends and failures which for some reason you think he had to design because all human evolutions are full of failures). I don’t understand what you mean by “everything he produced was required for successful completion of each creation”. He produced the brontosaurus, and so the brontosaurus was required for the successful completion of the mouse? As with your whole theory of evolution, I can’t find any logic. Nor can you, since your theory “makes sense only to God.”

DAVID: My view of an all-powerful God results in recognizing everything here is by God's intention. I know it makes sense at that level of thought.

Of course it does. What doesn’t make sense is your interpretation of what he intended, which does not fit in with everything that was and still is here. That is why you have completely ignored everything I have written above. Please stop dodging!


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