More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, June 29, 2024, 08:03 (71 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God is not human in any way. Any emotional attributes must be applied allegorically. Your tired distortion of God's use of evolution has been answered.

dhw: There you go again. Your teacher Adler is neutral on the subject of God’s personality, whereas you are certain that your God has no human attributes. And to hell with all those theologians who are certain, for instance, that God loves us and wants us to worship him.

DAVID: My personal theology is mine. I follow Adler and Aquinas only.

Except that Adler doesn’t cover your daft theory of evolution, and he is neutral on the subject of human attributes, whereas you are certain that your God has none.

God’s “challenge”

dhw: ...And what might have been his purpose for challenging us?

DAVID: I assume to make life more interesting.

dhw: Interesting for us or for him? You are still lumbered with your theory that your all-powerful, all-knowing God knowingly created ways in which to make us suffer. Hardly commensurate with your vision of an all-good God. And do you really believe that we would find life less interesting without the pain and misery your God deliberately created for us?

DAVID: Theodicy answered before. The greater good comes with a small portion of bad.

And so we should ignore, for example, the flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918, because they were only a small portion compared to the people that didn’t get the flu. The evil that your God allowed or created is real, and that is why the subject of theodicy arose in the first place. You don’t solve the problem by trying to ignore it.

Giraffes

DAVID: God's choice, for His unknown reasons we cannot know.

dhw: Since we cannot know his reasons, how do you know that his reason for designing non- giraffes was to design giraffes bit by bit in spurts, and that his reason for designing giraffes was that bit by bit he wanted to design us and our food in spurts, although he could have designed and actually did design whatever he liked “de novo”?

DAVID: You most look at the total history of God's evolutionary works. Giraffes fit into their ecosystem.

All life forms throughout the history of life “fit into their ecosystem” until – according to you – their God decides to wreck the system and/or to cull 99.9% of the life forms that made up that system.

Theoretical origin of life: Need for repair

QUOTE: Belief that simpler “proto-cells” didn’t require repair mechanisms requires blind faith, set against the prevailing scientific evidence." (David’s bold)
DAVID: as I have shown here in the past all of OOL research is based on blind faith that life can appear naturally.

dhw: I agree. This is the case against atheism. Just as it requires blind faith to believe in the existence of a supreme, unknown and unknowable form of conscious mind that created the universe and the cell, and has simply existed for ever, without any source. Hence agnosticism. (dhw’s bold).

DAVID: Yes, your illogical position as always.

Why “illogical”? You say your Adler remained agnostic or neutral on the subject of God’s human attributes because God is unknowable. I remain neutral on the subject of God’s existence because no one can possibly know the truth about something unknowable.

Social adaptability in macaques

xeno: What this study directly assaults is the idea that macaques are automatons that react via instinct. They think like we do, sans language. (dhw's bold)

DAVID: I agree this was a thoughtful decision.

dhw: I agree completely. And I would extend the bolded comment to all organisms, though with the obvious proviso that our own human range of thought goes way, way, way beyond the limits of other life forms.

DAVID: I agree.

dhw: An important agreement in the light of our discussions on intelligence, and on the growing belief in the theory of cellular intelligence.

DAVID: They act intelligently. It can be solely from DNA directions.

dhw: I’m happy with your now more open approach: it “can be” is a far cry from your earlier 100% opposition to the theory.

DAVID: Solely=s 100%

Yes, and it “can be” does not mean it is. As you have often remarked yourself, the odds are 50/50.

Trilobites

DAVID: I would remind the reader this large population has no predecessors. They represent the Cambrian Gap.

And apparently they have no direct descendants, so apparently instead of directly designing the only things he wanted to design (humans plus food), he directly designed and then had to cull trilobites. Talk about messy and cumbersome and inefficient…