More "miscellany" PART TWO (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 07, 2022, 09:06 (477 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO

Bacterial antibiotic resistance

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.

dhw: 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! ;-)

DAVID: The dog-eat-dog world is a requirement for life to last. It is not the same thing as the free-for-all evolutionary process you wish for in your humanized god.

I don’t “wish for” anything. I am looking for rational explanations. If, as above, your humanized God did not want total control (which clearly he does not have if the battle for survival is a free-for-all, depending on luck), then it would have been his wish not to have full control. And don’t you think the lucky survival of species might possibly have dictated which of them would then have evolved into new species? […]

DAVID: Evolution is any process that produces more successful forms, generally with increasing complexity. Only one line of change reaches the desired result. The other lines that survive must survive to provide the food for life for all existing forms. all in ecosystems.

I’m not sure about criteria for success. You might argue that bacteria are the most successful forms of life, but OK, if your God’s desired result was us, other lines would have had to survive and lead to the ecosystems that would provide food for us. The problem you have edited out as usual is the lines he specially designed which did not lead to us or our food. Remember?

The danger of solar flairs.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Your comments above show a still fully vacant understanding of my line of logic: what is in our reality is the result of God's creation. He wished what is here and chose how to do it by evolution of forms.

Yes, if God exists, our reality is the result of his creation. That does not mean he individually created every species, lifestyle, econiche, strategy, natural wonder etc. It could all be the result of his creating a mechanism that gave rise to a free-for-all. And yes, he could have given cells the wherewithal to make the changes necessary to evolve into new species.

DAVID: And you distort Adler's reasoning, in which He looked at the process of evolution run by God and concluded the final result of the process, humans, proved God.

For the hundredth time: I do not have a problem with the theory that humans and indeed all living creatures are so complex that they provide evidence for the existence of your God. That is NOT the issue between us. Please stop pretending that it is.

DAVID: And finally, dead ends are a required part of any evolutionary process, yes or no?

Once again, no. Dead ends occur in all the forms of evolution we know, human-made and also the evolution of life. If there is a particular goal, they are the failures which disappear precisely because they are NOT required. If there is no particular goal, they're not required for anything, and it's just a matter of Raup's bad luck. I do not know of any evolution in which designers deliberately set out to create failures, as you seem to think your God did.

Beavers

QUOTES: "In truth, western science is merely relearning what North America’s Indigenous peoples have known for millennia. The Blackfeet so venerated beavers’ water-creating abilities that they forbade killing them…
By destroying beaver ponds and wetlands, the fur trade also distorted ecosystems. (David’s bold)

Thank you for this lovely article, and also for highlighting what I think is common ground between us. Indigenous peoples all over the world have known for millennia that Nature is extremely efficient at balancing ecosystems, and western science has interfered, often with catastrophic consequences. Allied to human greed, it has perhaps even brought us to within sight of our own extinction.


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