More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 03, 2024, 09:44 (141 days ago) @ David Turell

Why would God “challenge” us? (Now “theodicy”)

dhw; Some theologists argue that evil is the consequence of your God allowing free will, and others regard it as God’s punishment of sin. They don’t all tell us to bury our heads in the sand. […] I really don’t know how many theologists try to ignore the suffering altogether as you recommend, but if they do, then I stand by my view that that is a dodge and not an answer.

DAVID: The basic answer is proportionality: the massive good giving us fruitful life far outweighs the secondary bad effects.

And so when we ask how an all-good God can deliberately*** produce evil, we should answer that the diseases, floods, famines, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes etc. don’t matter, and so we shouldn’t ask how an all-good God can produce evil.
*** Deliberately in your theology, because he did it in order to challenge us.

Offshoot from Giraffes

DAVID: Removing 99.9% of older forms is how evolution works, or have you forgotten that?

dhw: The 99.9% loss is the history of the only evolution we know. The reason for the loss is that when conditions change, the vast majority of species are unable to adapt to them. Only 0.1% survive. Raup says they are the lucky ones. You say your God deliberately designed the 99.9%, knowing they were irrelevant to his purpose, and so he had to cull them. That is why you ridicule your God as an imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer. Or have you forgotten that?

DAVID: Evolution works by culling 99.9%. The resulting 0.1% are a superb result of the process. Why are you complaining? God handled His purpose beautifully.

According to you, it is not evolution that culls 99.9% but your God, who deliberately designed them, knowing that they were irrelevant and he would have to cull them. You say he handled his purpose imperfectly, messily, cumbersomely and inefficiently, all of which means "beautifully". You have a remarkable gift for making a mockery of language. This, however, goes back to the “schizophrenic” split between your religious emotion and your analytic reasoning. You want your God to be perfect, and if God is perfect, his work must be perfectly efficient, but your analytically reasoning self tells you that your theory makes it imperfectly inefficient.

Snake explosion (now cellular intelligence)

DAVID: . Intelligently acting cells are actually automatons following DNA instructions and not equal to a mind.

dhw: As usual, you dismiss all those scientists who believe that cells are autonomously intelligent, because you know best.

DAVID: ID believes as I do. You've cherry-picked a few on the other side.

dhw: ID-ers are no more qualified than you or me to tell us the “actual” facts. We all “cherry-pick”. However, I accept that Shapiro’s theory is still unproven, whereas you seem unable to accept that your own theories of a divine, 3.8-billion-year-old set of instructions or an endless series of divine, ad hoc dabbles is also unproven.

DAVID: All theories are unproven.

So please stop pretending that your theories are facts, as in “intelligently acting cells are actually automatons…”

The brain

dhw: Atheists have blind faith in chance. The complexities of the brain are nothing compared to the complexities of a mind powerful enough to create universes and design brains, but you have blind faith that such a mind can have come from nowhere and has simply existed for ever. You can each mock the other for your blind faith, and you are welcome to mock me for my neutrality, but the fact remains that nobody knows the truth.

DAVID: Logically a mind must have done the designing. Deny that!

dhw: And logically, if our minds could not exist without being designed, then a mind infinitely more powerful than our own must also have been designed, but you have blind faith
that it has simply always been there for ever and ever.

DAVID: It has to start with an eternal mind.

Atheists will say it has to start with chance. Agnostics say that nobody can know how it started.

Is there life on Europa?

DAVID: Consider the meaning to religions if life is there. How will that relate to conceptions of God and God's role in creating humans? From my viewpoint, I see no problem. Simply, God made this universe life-supporting as shown by the fine-tuning evidence.

And although his one and only purpose was apparently to design us plus food, he may have designed billions of heavenly bodies totally unsuitable for life, plus unknown numbers of potentially life-supporting bodies which contain nothing but extremophiles – or indeed no life at all. And their purpose would have been…ah! Only God knows.

Junk DNA goodbye

DAVID: it is now obvious every bit of DNA is there for a reason. The very fine tight controls of protein production reeks of design. Trial and error cannot accomplish this mechanism.

As usual, I’ll just point out that the absence of junk would confirm natural selection, which ensures that only what is useful will survive.