More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, July 04, 2024, 09:42 (140 days ago) @ David Turell

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

DAVID: The basic answer is proportionality: the massive good giving us fruitful life far outweighs the secondary bad effects.
And:
DAVID: That is how theologians handle it. The Dayenu approach.

Please stop pretending that all theologians think the same as you. I’ve given you two examples of different theologies (God gave us free will, God wants to punish us for our sins), and you offered a third: God wants to challenge us. It’s no answer to tell us that your all-good God created evil because there’s not enough of it for us to bother discussing it.

Offshoot from Giraffes

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.

dhw: 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".

DAVID: Try this interpretation, God handled a messy system of His own choice and produced us, the most complex item in the universe.

He also deliberately produced 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us, which is why you ridicule his system as being imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient. But you want him and it to be perfect and efficient, so your inner Jekyll and Hyde make you present me and any fellow readers with a theory that is sheer nonsense.

DAVID: Yes, I have two sides to my thinking. And you are strict literalist as you interpret me. God perfectly used an inefficient system, as humans review it.

There is no interpretation involved. If someone says an imperfect, inefficient system is perfect and beautiful, God may have human-like attributes but can’t possibly have human-like attributes, might want to be worshipped but can’t possibly want to be worshipped, then of course we take the contradictions literally. As for the system, you have your first-cause, omniscient and omnipotent God knowingly and deliberately inventing an imperfect, inefficient system. Is it your Jekyll or your Hyde that wants to make a fool of him?

The brain

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.

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

DAVID: Agnostics have a negative opinion. Something did it!

You’re right. My definition above – Huxley’s original definition – is negative. Nowadays, though, it has also come to mean don’t know/can’t decide rather than can’t know (much to the disapproval of the purists), and I’d say this is on a par with Adler’s neutrality in relation to God’s attributes. Neutrality is not negative. But you are right again: something did it. That doesn’t mean we have to opt for one or other of the blind faiths.

Is there life on Europa?

DAVID: […] God made this universe life-supporting as shown by the fine-tuning evidence.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Exactly!

So although you can’t think of a single reason, you start with the wish that your God exists and had the purpose you wish him to have. The rest follows, and you and your Jekyll and Hyde cover your eyes and jump, arguing with yourselves as you do so.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Yes, the logical view of 'junk DNA'. Which kills Darwin's use of chance mutations.

I have rejected that part of his theory right from the start.

Ants amputate wounded legs

DAVID: I suspect this is a learned process over time. However, it requires memory of past events and conceptualization to recognize the difference in the two types of amputation. That the need for amputation at the tibial site is not recognized supports learned vs. instinct from design.

Just like our human medical care, the process initially has to be one of learning, and whatever is learned has to be passed from one generation to the next: i.e. what works, but also what doesn’t (e.g. with particular plants). As you rightly say, it involves memory, but also sentience, information-processing, communication, decision-making, and all the other factors which we associate with autonomous intelligence.