More Miscellany: Bechly reappears (General)

by dhw, Friday, June 21, 2024, 11:58 (99 days ago) @ David Turell

Oxidation

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."

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Not a dodge. Ignoring your baseless distortion of evolutionary statistics from Raup.

There is no distortion other than your own. Raup says that the 99.9% of extinctions are caused by changing conditions, and the survival of the 0.1% is a matter of luck. I have no problem with this argument. You, on the other hand, introduce your God (never mentioned by Raup) and interpret the statistics as meaning that God had to obey some weird law that forces him to design and cull 99.9% of life forms irrelevant to his purpose. Sheer nonsense.

“Overblown Darwin-speak”

Quote: Evolution repeats itself.

David calls this “phony, overblown Darwin-speak propaganda".

dhw: 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.

DAVID: We are now arguing at a different level. You are now defending evolution as if I attacked the term. I attacked the constant misuse of the term by Darwinians. The headline touted evolution and then proceeded to define intraspecies adaptations. You wouldn't recognize Darwin-speak if it slapped you in the face.

The article went on to attack Darwin’s theory of randomness. The established fact that evolution repeats itself is not “touting” Darwin’s theory. You yourself constantly tell us that your God used evolution to produce the universe, the planet, and all life forms, including us. Are you touting Darwin’s theory?

Black holes

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: So, your human mind thinks God did it wrong. That is why God is incomprehensible to you.

You insist that God created the billions of stars etc. and the 99.9% of extinct species for the sole purpose of designing us plus our food, you can't tell us why, and you even tell us that his method was imperfect and inefficient, and then you tell me that I think he did it wrong! No, YOU do! I have no idea why he would have created the billions of stars etc., and they are a factor in my uncertainty over his existence. However, as far as the 99.9% are concerned, I have offered you three THEISTIC reasons for their existence and extinction, but you prefer your own theory that God made a mess of things.

Brain stem controls

dhw:. 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.

DAVID: Another dhw jibe at how un-'special' humans are. Our brain is not explainable by Darwin theory. Why? Based on survivability it is overkill. Apes and Chimps could easily have continued on their own without us barging in.

The complexities of the mouse brain are also unexplainable by Darwin’s theory of random mutations. But all its complexities have been passed on to us, which would seem to confirm Darwin’s theory of common descent. You have also confirmed that early sapiens would have used their brains primarily for survival. I have never disagreed that we have special gifts. I only disagree with your belief that your God must have specially dabbled them, and that we and our brains (plus our food) must have been his one and only purpose.