More Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Monday, April 15, 2024, 09:32 (15 days ago) @ David Turell

Evolution and purpose: teleonomy.

dhw: […] in my opinion a book which presents scientific evidence that organisms themselves shape the course of evolution should not be criticized for not delving into theology.

DAVID: A reviewer can take any viewpoint He wishes. It is your obligation to evaluate the review.

Agreed. And I have done so.

Giant viruses

DAVID: Same leap back to the same muddled distortion of the history of evolution which actually required that degree of extinctions.

dhw: I didn’t know history had requirements. How many evolutions have you experienced? I thought you thought it was your God who decided he must design and extinguish the 99.9% of species irrelevant to his purpose, though you can’t find any reason for his doing so.

DAVID: The history of evolution had extinction requirements. You continue to torture Raup's book. All of evolution required a 99.9% lost.

I have no idea what Raup believes, and I wish you would tackle my arguments directly instead of hiding behind him. If God exists, he would have determined what evolution required – he would not have been bound by some requirement he hadn’t created for himself. Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God require himself to design 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his one and only purpose?

dhw: […] please tell us […] what you think is the necessary role of the influenza virus.

DAVID: Just like Covid. God-given brains are challenged and protect us.

dhw: Millions die or are impaired for life, and that is necessary because God gave us brains to protect ourselves with. I find your logic incomprehensible.

DAVID: Millions died or are impaired. Where did you find such statistics to extrapolate?

dhw: One website gives the number of known Covid deaths as 7,010,631. The flu epidemic that hit the world in 1918 killed an estimated 50 million people.

DAVID: Thank you, Good statistics. Thank the Chinese for inventing the virus.

Influenza was the virus we started with. Now that you know it killed 50 million in 1918, we can proceed to the next question.

dhw: But you think such suffering is justified because your God wants to give us a challenge. Please tell us why you think he wants to challenge us.

DAVID: If you wish everyone sat peacefully around doing nothing just eating and sleeping, would you want a life like that? I'll take the challenges!

dhw: I have no idea why you think an interesting life would be impossible without rape, murder and millions of deaths from the diseases for which you blame your God. You keep telling us under “Theodicy” to ignore the evil and focus on all the good your God has created! Now we should forget all the good (the joys of love, family, friendship, art, sport, travel, etc.), and you thank God for creating or allowing evil to prevent you from getting bored.

DAVID: I never ignored the 'good'. Your fallacy.

You have just done so here and on the Plantinga thread. Without evil, you think “Eden” would be boring (“sitting around...just eating and sleeping”).

Cell complexity: formation of the centriole

DAVID: Design means a designer did it.

dhw: Yes, That is a rational conclusion. But if a complex life requires a designing mind, the designing mind must be so complex that it too would require a designer: you need blind faith to believe that an unknown, immaterial, superpowerful form of consciousness can simply exist without a source. That is why I remain on my picket fence.

DAVID: I'll stick with there must be a first cause.

I agree. The basic choice lies between an eternal, conscious, sourceless mind and an eternal, infinite mass of ever changing matter and energy forming endless combinations which eventually produce the first forms of life. One of these must be the truth, but I can’t choose between them.

The wild Milky Way center

QUOTES: “A huge black hole with high-speed stars in all sorts of wild orbits…”

“A few stars win the collision lottery…"

DAVID: by design the Earth is safely far away, two-thirds of the way out on the second spiral arm. It seems the larger the galaxy, the more turbulent is its center.

Bearing in mind that ours is only one of billions of galaxies in a universe that contains trillions of stars and quintillions of black holes, I can’t help feeling that the lottery image is more appropriate than that of design.

Mictobiomes and post-surgical infections

DAVID: the infections occur, not because the bacteria are 'bad', but they are freely built to survive on any food available. Not God's fault. Bacteria necessarily live as freely-acting organisms.

And yet a couple of weeks ago, you wrote: “What is fair is to blame God for natural disasters: earthquakes, terrible storms, and bugs causing diseases, non-human parts of his creation.” Why are you blaming him, if it’s not for the fact that he knowingly gave bacteria the freedom to infect us as well as help us? And why then would you not blame him if he knowingly gave us the freedom to do evil? Or do you mean that your omnipotent and omniscient God was powerless and too ignorant to prevent the evil caused by his inventions?