More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by dhw, Monday, March 27, 2023, 09:16 (368 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Of course, He wanted to design all of evolution's organisms, most of which became our food.

dhw: 99% did not become our food. 99% were dead ends that provided food for past life, which “plays no role in current life”.

DAVID: Again evolution is sliced into disparate unrelated parts. Foolishness for an argument.

dhw: I have quoted you! If extinct past species play no role in current life, then of course they are not related to our “part” of evolution! The continuum is provided by the 1% of survivors, not the 99% of dead ends!

DAVID: Another example of distortion. My quote simply says the past is in the past!!!

No it doesn’t. The two quotes were: “The current bush of food is NOW for humans NOW. There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms” and “Extinct life has no role in current time.”

DAVID: Of course there is a continuum. Thanks for finally accepting it. The 99.9% is the required screening evolution produces. It is a natural part of the process you keep dissecting.

I have always accepted the continuum (you cannot have common descent without it) and the historical fact of 99% extinction! What I do not accept is your theory that your God invented a process which compelled him to design 100 species in order to design us and our food, even though 99 did not lead to us and our food. But see the next item:

dhw: Do you still believe that your God individually designed every extinct species, and every extinct species was “an absolute requirement” for him to be able to design us and our food?

DAVID: Yes

dhw: So if he hadn’t designed the brontosaurus (plus the other 99% of pre- and post-Cambrian non-survivors, not to mention all the extinct lifestyles and strategies and natural wonders), neither we nor our food could have existed, even though he was perfectly capable of designing species without predecessors (Cambrian). […]

DAVID: Where is your theory He should have directly created us? That He didn't is your problem.

There is no theory that he “should have directly created us”! The question is why, if we were his only purpose and he was able to design species without precursors, he did not design us directly. I have given you three alternative, logical reasons.

DAVID: I accept that God invented a slow cumbersome process and used it successfully.

You don’t “accept” that – you propose it, plus “inefficient” and “messy”.

More bacterial mat complexity

dhw: The autonomous intelligence of single-celled bacteria leads them to form communities which can become fundamentally different from single cells. It is patently absurd to argue that once they form different communities, they lose their intelligence. […]

DAVID: At their community level their intelligent actions are real and continuous. Cellular adaptability in multicellular organisms is obvious. Shapiro's theory is an extrapolation of his bacterial studies. God makes perfect sense also.

dhw: Thank you for acknowledging the intelligence of cell communities. If by “God makes sense”, you mean it makes sense that their intelligence was designed by him, yes of course it does – if he exists. If you mean that God preprogrammed every decision made by every cell community throughout life's history, or popped in to deliver instructions for every decision, then I’m afraid I’m extremely sceptical.

DAVID: Your general skepticism about my God is obvious.

I am an agnostic, and all my theories allow for the possibility of God’s existence. I am not sceptical about the design argument, but find the above theory of preprogramming and/or dabbling every single decision in the history of life a bit far-fetched. Don’t you?

Was there a before?

QUOTES: "As a theory, “the Big Bang leaves out the bang,” physicist Brian Green writes in The Fabric of the Cosmos. Whatever happened in that instant, let alone before that moment, is anyone’s (well-reasoned) guess — and there is no shortage of guesses of how the universe began.

Precisely. It has to be guesswork because we cannot know. One guess is the following:

QUOTE: the point is that the question itself is nonsensical. We’re trying to pin down something that simply doesn’t exist.

How the heck does this person know that something doesn’t/didn’t exist?

DAVID: multiverse, cyclic universe and Penrose special cyclic form are mentioned for completeness. Guth et al paper simply said there was no before, before the Big Bang. They simply could not prove one nad neither would anyone else. Brian Green sets up the Big Bang theory backwards.

I’m glad to see the dismissal of Guth, but I don’t understand the comment on Brian Green. He simply says we can’t go back to the moment of the bang itself, let alone what preceded (or caused) it. And so we can only guess.

DAVID: From my viewpoint, if space and time started the beginning it came from nothing. God made it happen.

We can’t know what “started the beginning”, and for all we know there could have been space and time before the BB. Your eternal God can’t be nothing, and if he exists, we can’t know what he got up to during the eternity that preceded the BB.


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