More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, June 30, 2024, 12:22 (69 days ago) @ David Turell

Why would God “challenge” us?

DAVID: I assume to make life more interesting.

dhw: Interesting for us or for him? […] 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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Never ignored. I first entered Theodicy here.

You raised the subject, and then you told us we should forget about it because, for example, the 50 million victims of flu in 1918 are only “a small portion” of bad compared to good. Add that example to all the victims of floods, famines, diseases, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and all your God’s other deliberate “challenges” to make our lives more interesting. How do they support the theory of an all-good God?

Offshoot from Giraffes

DAVID:[..] Evolution is a developmental stepwise process of creating desired forms from previous ones. Not the destructive distortion you use.

But YOURS is the destructive version, or do you not regard deliberate culling as destructive, e.g. your God chucking down an asteroid to kill off the dinosaurs? Under theodicy, you talk of proportion. In your theory of evolution, your God designed and culled 99.9 out of 100 species. His stepwise creation of desired forms from previous ones involved 0.1% of the species he designed. No wonder you ridicule the destructive inefficiency of the purpose and method you inflict on him.

Trilobites

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

dhw: 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…

DAVID: Thank you for recognizing my theology. Yes, trilobites are a dead end but: " The closest living relatives (but not direct descendants) of trilobites are the chelicerates (a group of arthropods that contains animals such as horseshoe crabs, sea spiders, and arachnids (spiders, scorpions, etc.)."
https://www.activewild.com/trilobites/#descendants

Thank you. Interesting, but hardly an explanation of their necessity for the creation of us and our food.

DAVID: The Trilobites played a major role in the Cambrian ecosystem. Only God knows why.

And that sums up the whole of your daft theory. It makes no sense to you, but as you refuse to consider any other theory, you are confident that your God chose an imperfect and inefficient way to achieve the purpose you impose on him.

Snake explosion

QUOTE: “In the case of snakes, it’s likely there were multiple contributing factors, and it may never be possible to fully define each factor and their role in this unique evolutionary process.” It other words, it was a biological Big Bang and they have no clue what caused it. But of course it must have been unguided evolution, no intelligence allowed!"

DAVID: dhw will ask if snakes are necessary for God's goal to produce humans. He made them so rapidly He must have thought so.

You don’t know why your God designed the 99.9% he culled, and you don’t why he didn’t cull snakes. Just like the rest of us, you know nothing, but you pretend to know that God could not possibly have engineered evolution in any way other than the imperfect, messy, cumbersome, inefficient one you impose on him.
In answer to the quote, of course we can never know the precise conditions that gave rise to innovation, but the short so-called “waiting time” can be explained by intelligent design through intelligent cells instead of through some unknown and unknowable, sourceless mind. See the next article, however, for the REAL problem.

The brain
DAVID: bit by bit, using mouse brains, we find distinct areas of brain function. Brains appeared abruptly and originally in Trilobites and over forms over 500 million years ago. Even those simple brains had complex neurons. How does natural evolution explain them? It can't.

Neurons are cells. Bit by bit, we are uncovering how simple brains evolved into more complex brains, and the very fact that so many of the complexities of the human brain are also to be found in the mouse brain confirms that for all its indisputable superiority, the human brain descended from earlier brains. This evolution can be explained by Shapiro’s theory that individual cells are intelligent enough to form all the different combinations that have formed all the different organs and organisms since the very first cells appeared. This would be the basis of what you call “natural evolution”. However, the ORIGIN of these cells remains an open question: the God theory is one answer and chance is another: I am agnostic because I find each answer difficult to accept.