More "miscellany" PARTS ONE and TWO (General)

by dhw, Saturday, February 04, 2023, 08:09 (419 days ago) @ David Turell

Finding first stars

dhw: So your all-powerful God says to himself: “I gotta design 200 billion trillion stars so I can get the carbon I need to design my messy 99% of mistakes and failed experiments plus my 1% of successes to fulfil my one and only purpose of designing humans and their food.” You can find no reason for this nonsense (your theory makes sense only to God), but my objection to your making an incompetent fool of your God is apparently due to my preconceived prejudices.

DAVID: The bold is nonsense!! Once again, if a universe appeared and evolution happened God caused all of it. God can do it any way He wishes. Obviously, God chose His methods, we are here. I cannot know God's reasons for these choices. (dhw’s bold)

If God exists, of course he caused all of it and could do it any way he wished, chose his method, and we are here. That applies to all my theories as well as yours. But I have given you logical reasons for all my alternatives, whereas you can’t think of a single reason why he would choose YOUR version of his method, as bolded above!

DAVID: Your preconceived prejudices are shown in the form of God you constantly present, with a prime example of His changing His mind as He evolves life. Another example is a God who invites a free-for-all to run evolution for His entertainment while He loses control of evolution's direction. You invented Him? Why?

You’ve accepted my first theistic theory(experimentation), but changed it into a version that makes a fool of your God. The second (“new ideas”) does not involve a change of mind: it entails discovering the full potential of the original idea – an admirable exercise practised by most creative artists. The free-for-all is much the same, seeing what will happen if he gives free rein to his amazing invention (but he can always dabble). You have him depending on changing conditions, over which you say he has no control, and making mistake after mistake. You invented this derogatory version. Why?

An early worm

dhw: We have a mystery on our hands, and we should keep an open mind as to its possible solutions.

DAVID: No mystery to me. God designed the Cambrian Explosion.

dhw: I have noticed that your mind is firmly closed on all such issues.

DAVID: I'm not allowed to believe in God?

Our discussions are currently based solely on the nature, purpose and method of your God, assuming that he exists. Your mind is firmly closed on all these issues, even though your explanations “make sense only to God”, i.e. not to you.

An early form

DAVID: You dragged in your complaint again when it doesn't apply to this item of a fossil from an animal that survived beyond the usual. As for hidden fossils to remove the Cambrian gap, the Edicaran and Cambrian layers are known and explored all over the world. For 170 years the gap has survived. Odds on, it will survive.

My complaint applies because you constantly use the gap as evidence of your God’s existence, but try to forget it when I point out to you that this creates yet more problems for your theory of evolution. You claim that the gap means he designed our ancestors without predecessors. Originally this made nonsense of your belief that we were his only purpose from the start, but your new theory tells us that if he could create our ancestors from scratch, he didn’t even NEED to make what you call his mistakes and failed experiments beforehand. He could just have waited till conditions were right for his brand new designs. As for hidden fossils, you don’t know any more than I do what still remains to be found or what can never be found because of the problem of preservation. But unlike you, I am not claiming to have solved the mystery and have not closed my mind.

Immunity system complexity: control of reactions

QUOTES: "Over the course of evolution, the human body has developed a variety of strategies to prevent the immune response from overshooting its mark.
"'Over the course of its evolution, the immune system has developed increasingly powerful weapons in a sort of arms race against pathogens," summarizes Blankenstein.
"

DAVID: the exactly perfect amino acids are used. How does a naturally produced evolution find exactly what it needs? It certainly suggests a designer at work.

It certainly suggests intelligence at work. I know you think your God designed every “strategy” and every new “weapon” throughout the whole process of the system’s evolution (and maybe even provides instructions for every new antibody in the ever expanding library). A theistic alternative, of course, is that he endowed cells/cell communities with the intelligence to design their own evolution.


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