More Miscellany: Bechly reappears (General)

by dhw, Thursday, June 20, 2024, 11:52 (154 days ago) @ David Turell

Oxidation

DAVID: God controls all.

dhw: So in order to produce us and our food, your omniscient and omnipotent God kept changing environmental conditions and deliberately designing new species which he knew he would have to cull because they were not the species he actually wanted to design, and he deliberately kept “adjusting” for some 3+ billion years’ worth of unsuitable conditions and irrelevant species until he had finished adjusting, got rid of the 99.9% of irrelevant conditions and species, and finally produced us plus food. But this could not possibly have been a process of experimentation. It simply had to be his very own imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient way of fulfilling the one and only purpose you devised for him.

DAVID: As in the other thread: " You rail about God's use of evolution, but that is His way of creating: a universe evolving from the Big Bang, an Earth evolving in its galaxy, which also evolved over time. Life is much more complicated than the universe it lives in. So God evolved it from Archaea to us."

As in the other thread, you have completely ignored the problem under discussion, which is why your God deliberately designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his one and only purpose. Stop dodging.

bacteria use bacteriophages in warfare (now “overblown Darwin-speak”)

DAVID: "You still don't understand I rage against Darwinists misuse of words and his theory, not himself."

dhw: It’s nice of you to stand up for Darwin, although you call his theory “undefendable”. But I still don’t understand how the straightforward statement of fact that “evolution repeats itself” can be viewed as "phony, overblown Darwin-speak propaganda”.

DAVID: It was a misuse of the word evolution when all that is shown is repeated adaptations, not new species which is true evolution.

“Evolution repeats itself” is not a definition but an observation. Evolution is defined as the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms. Do you disagree? Of course this process entails repetition – otherwise there would be no link between organisms and their ancestors. And so it is a simple statement of fact that (the process of) evolution repeats itself in different ways. Nothing phony, overblown or Darwin-speak propaganda about it.

Black holes

DAVID: When I say God designed it, dhw will ask why did God make it so big and complex. Why should the issue of God change the way we look at the universe? The atheist views it and accepts it as a natural result of chance events. From both viewpoints the universe simply is what it is.

dhw: Not quite. We all agree that the universe is as it is, but you as a theist insist that there is a particular purpose behind all that is – namely, the creation of us and our food. The atheist says it has no purpose. The agnostic says we don’t and can’t know if there is a purpose.

DAVID: Well, I'll stick to a teleological approach since every new level shows a purposeful response to need.

Does it? Please tell us the need for the billions of stars, solar systems etc. extant and extinct, and the 99.9% of species not needed for the implementation of the one and only purpose you allow your God: the design of us and our food.

Brain stem controls

QUOTE: “How far does the brain’s control over body biology go?”

A fascinating question. Many thanks for yet another wonderfully educational article. The mind boggles not only at the complexity of the brain but also at the promise such research has for the treatment of diseases. Also to be noted is the fact that all these complexities are to be found in mice and no doubt in other mammals that were here long before sapiens arrived on the scene.