More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by dhw, Saturday, March 18, 2023, 12:39 (11 days ago) @ David Turell

A massive extinction in the late Devonian

DAVID: Your bumbling view of a clueless God. God create the cyanobacteria which gave us oxygen. If God was so restricted in your distorted version how did He manage to produce our brain, the most comples item in our univeres?

dhw: It’s as if you have never read your own theory! It’s YOU who claim that 99% of his designs were mistakes etc, and it’s YOU who say he had no control over the environment which determines whether organisms live or die! Yours is the bumbling clueless God! My three theistic alternatives all include our brain, but they dispense with your concept of a bumbling, clueless God.(See the "David's evolution" thread for details.)

DAVID: Please absorb: God limited adaptability, because only He created new species. Remember. Fully explains the survival rate so low. Purposeful limited adapability.

“Please absorb”: a month ago you wrote, “The design failed a necessary adaptation to changes. It is a design fault in a lack of adaptability.” And you called the non-survivors “mistakes”, because they did not lead to his one and only purpose. And each uncontrolled environmental change brought the same process – with his faulty designs resulting in another 99% of mistakes, until luck provided him with the environment (Cambrian) he needed, so he started all over again with our ancestors, who had no predecessors.

dhw: If you now wish to withdraw this whole theory of your God as an incompetent blunderer, please say so and have done with it.

DAVID: You made Him a blunderer, not me. God used this system fully aware of the necessary low survival rate. He managed it beautifully, creating us and our magnificent brain.

As the all-powerful creator of all things, you say he was fully aware that he would be forced by his self-imposed lack of control over the environment to make mistake after mistake, in what you have called an “inefficient” and “cumbersome” method of achieving his goal, but in your remarkable new language, mistakes and failures and faults and inefficiency etc. constitute beautiful management.

How bacterial flagella operate

dhw: How do you think bad bacteria manage to find ways of countering new human efforts to destroy them? Did your God plant instructions to make sure they could automatically carry on killing us?

DAVID: God coded bacterial DNA to know good food from bad sense enemies and respond to them.

dhw: So he coded them to carry on killing us. Fine! I suggest that what your God “coded” (if he exists) can only have been the MEANS of sensing, processing, and responding – unless he keeps popping in with new instructions for every new situation. The means, of course, would be intelligence.

DAVID: Just what God did, and it all works automatically.

dhw:Do you mean he keeps popping in with instructions? Since new problems are arising all the time, and technology is improving all the time, I wonder if future research will develop the means of filming your God popping in with his instructions. Should be fascinating.

DAVID: God's work is totally immaterial providing instructions.

Damn! Then we’ll never have any concrete evidence that he keeps popping in. We’ll just have to take your word for it.

Neutrinos still confusing

DAVID: Why do you denigrate new research when it will bring us an understanding of your 'bigness' problem.

dhw: Where have you found me denigrating new research? You said it might help me, but you are the one with a problem, because you have a theory that you are desperate to prove: God had to create trillions of stars and solar systems in order to design us and our food.

DAVID: My desperate approach is simplicity itself: the size is required.

dhw: Just as the 99% of speciation blunders are “required”, and you don’t know why, and we should ask God because you haven’t got a clue why we should believe your theory.

DAVID: My first clue is your full disbelief in God.

There you go again. I am an agnostic, and all the alternative theories I have proposed allow for your God’s existence.

DAVID: I've convinced myself to believe. I know fully why the poor survival rate: God purposely limited survivability, repeated ad nauseum.

Your God purposely came up with what you call a faulty design, plus all the other mistakes and failed experiments described above and on the other thread. And you’ve convinced yourself that your theory, which “makes sense only to God” and therefore not to you, is true.

Giraffe plumbing

dhw: Please tell us why you think your God would have designed the long necks of the extinct Mamenchisaurus and the giraffe.

DAVID: The giraffe is part of a cud-chewing ecosystem. God doesn't create anything not required. In dinosaurs weird possibilities popped up. God knows why that happened.

Not required for what? 99% of his creations were not required for what you claim was his one and only purpose. And you clearly have no idea why he created the long necks or the weird dinosaurs. Only God can explain your nonsense.