More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, July 05, 2024, 09:31 (65 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The basic answer is proportionality. […] That is how theologians handle it. The Dayenu approach.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Allow me to quote to you the standard response to theodicy in the theological literature.

Who decides what is “standard”, since nobody knows the truth? Why have you ignored my comment above? Have you read every book ever written by every theologian that ever existed? Didn’t you know about the alternatives? Why have you yourself offered an alternative (God wants to challenge us)? Please stop pretending that the answer is not to answer.

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".

You proceeded to ignore this ridiculous contradiction delivered by your Jekyll and Hyde self, and revert to the same silly argument we have dealt with over and over again:

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

dhw: 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: Your analysis of evolutionary statistics is sheer nonsense. God deliberately used evolution.

Still desperately dodging your ridiculous contradictions. Yes, if God exists, he deliberately used evolution. That does not mean we were his sole purpose, or that he deliberately designed and had to cull the 99.9% of irrelevant species – a statistic which leads you to conclude that your perfect and beautifully efficient God is an imperfect, and messily inefficient designer. Jekyll and Hyde.

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: It IS only one or the other.

But nobody can possibly know for sure which one it is, and so some of us refrain from adopting either of the blind faiths. But please understand that I am not against blind faith, so long as theists and atheists don’t pretend they know all the answers and cause damage to others with their one-sided ideas.

Ants amputate wounded legs

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Autonomous or automatic? Either one can fit.

Thank you. I’m happy if you stick to a 50/50 instead of pretending you know it’s 100% automatic.

Plants control water in the desert
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240703131733.htm

Crassula muscosa, native to Namibia and South Africa, can transport liquid in selected directions.

DAVID: the plant does not have a brain with which to produce this mechanism. I can't imagine the plant developing this by chance in the desert[…] Design is the answer.

Two comments from me: firstly, neither plants nor cells have brains, but in March you kindly drew our attention to a book which explicitly champions the theory of both plant and cellular intelligence, harking back to Lynn Margulis’s article entitled “The conscious cell”. You only have to google the question “Are plants intelligent?” and you’ll be surprised at the number of experts who answer yes.
Secondly, if your God’s one and only purpose was to design us and our food, why the heck would he specially design the crassula muscosa and the millions of other plants with their own special methods of survival?
Put your comment together with my own, and you have a an extremely feasible theory: yes, design by intelligent plants is the answer. And maybe plant intelligence was designed by your God.