More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 07, 2023, 11:17 (387 days ago) @ David Turell

Slime mold decisions and Fragility of ecosystems

DAVID: Still downgrading the concept of ecosystems importance. All ecosystems are interlocking and important to the overall economy of supplying food.
DAVID: the thrust of this article is an excited interest in protecting ecosystems. dhw refers to them as our food and constantly tries to diminish their importance. They were a major aspect of evolution, evolving as animals and plants evolved.

Please stop pretending that I diminish their importance. All organisms past and present have created and depended on fragile ecosystems. It is YOU who refer to them as “our” food, with your whacky theory that your God designed every one of them, past and present, as “absolute requirements” for humans and our food, although 99% of them were irrelevant to us and our food.

DAVID: Back you go to slicing and dicing evolution into a discontinuous process. Past ecosystems became today's ecosystems.

99% of them did not! Only one per cent of past organisms provided continuity and evolved into current organisms! Please stop dodging!

Asteroids

DAVID […] Note how advanced humans have become to defend us from asteroids. And dhw doesn't think we are God's main purpose as we are here to defend everything God created on Earth. I can't change dhw's rigidity.

dhw: […] Do you think he’s watching us now, thinking to himself how lucky it is that he designed us to defend his work, since he couldn’t/can’t do so himself?

DAVID: Yes, watching with no need for intervention. […]

dhw: You said you were not a deist, but watching with no need for intervention is a basic feature of deism. [..] And that is the essence of my third alternative: the free-for-all. Meanwhile, do you still believe that he has no control over asteroids, just as he has no control over other environmental changes such as forests turning into deserts?

DAVID: God may well intervene in 100 years from now. My statement allows for that.

So although he has no control over environmental changes, and has created us so that we can defend his creations, and has watched past asteroids destroying his creations, you reckon…what? 100 years from now he’ll wait until the last minute, and if we can’t stop the asteroid, he will? Has he been kidding you all along? Maybe he didn’t have to design all those past mistakes at all, because he could have stopped forests turning into deserts, and he could have created us and our food de novo. Why didn’t he? He ain’t tellin’. Or maybe your theory is simply a load of nonsense.

DAVID: God fully controls all. He may well have created Chixculub , as Gerald Schroeder surmised.

dhw: January 13 2023 - DAVID: Take Chixculub as a prime example. […] It is possible He tweaked a celestial body to slam into the Yucatan, I believe it happened on its own.

In January you stuck to your explicit belief that he did not control such environmental changes. Now he fully controls all.

DAVID: He controls all, but many things are set to run on their own, so He doesn't alter them.

I love it. He controls all, but there are many things he does not control. So you believe he didn’t control Chixculub, although he may well have controlled Chixculub. But he absolutely had to control the weaverbird’s nest-building and the opossum’s play-dead strategy. And of course he couldn’t possibly have designed cells to “run on their own”. (See below)

Epigenetic control of gene expression

DAVID: […] Cells have a degree of self-regulation.

dhw: […] although he designed cells with a degree of self-regulation, you insist that he couldn’t possibly have designed them to work out (or to fail to work out) their own ways of survival.

DAVID: Your brilliant cells lack a prefrontal cortex equivalent to an acting real mind.

So now your God is incapable of designing forms of intelligence that don’t depend on a prefrontal cortex.

Neanderthal and our health

DAVID: God does not need new experiences. Your entirely humanized God is on exhibit here!!

dhw: You always use the word “need”, as if my God was needy. And yet one of your theories regarding his one and only purpose is that he wants us to recognize him and admire his work. Pretty human of him, I’d say. I always use the word “want”, and I challenge your authority for telling us that your God doesn’t want new experiences. If he created our world from scratch (Big Bang theory), wasn’t our world something new even for him?

DAVID: How can the Big Bang be new to God? He designed it and knew in advance exactly what HE was getting. You still don't know how to think about a purposeful God.

Only God knows how to think about God – if he exists! If the BB marked the beginning of our universe, of course it was new – it had never existed before! How do you know he knew in advance what he was getting? Do you think that at the moment of creation he said to himself: “Now I’m gonna get a weaverbird so I can design its nest, and an opossum so I can teach it to play dead, an’ I’ll design an octopus with intelligent arms so humans can put it on their menu”?


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