More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, July 11, 2024, 09:32 (133 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy (under “the complexity of cell division”):

DAVID: That the cellular processes work so well is part of the proportionality defense of theodicy.

dhw: Let’s try a different approach: Fred Bloggs performed wonders with his charitable work. For 50 years, he helped poor people, providing them with food and shelter. There was just one day when he raped and murdered a little girl. The defence pleads “proportionality”: 50 years of good against 1 day of bad. Your verdict? In considering this, please bear in mind that your omniscient God knew exactly what suffering his murderous viruses (e.g. 50 million fatalities in 1918/19), floods, famines, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes etc. would cause, not to mention his foreknowledge of all the human-made evils he allowed to happen (e.g. 6 million Jews exterminated in the Holocaust) by giving humans free will, which Plantinga – your fellow religious philosopher – attributed to your God’s human-like desire to be spontaneously loved.

DAVID: Amazing that believers can live with your complaints. Proportionality is our answer.

You have ignored all of the above arguments, as well as the theories that evil is the consequence of God giving us free will, or is God’s punishment for our sins, or – your own invention – is God’s “challenge” to us, or is God’s way of making life more interesting. My comments are not complaints: they explain the problem of theodicy and the reason why “proportionality” is a non-answer. Your comment is your usual dodge of repeating what you believe and trying to shut out any arguments that focus on the contradictions which make nonsense of your beliefs.

Back to David’s “schizophrenia”

DAVID: My God is all-powerful and omniscient. He sets goals and achieves them. We don't know if we can apply human attributes to Him.

My alternatives offer goals and achievement of goals, but without contradictions and without your ridicule of your all-powerful, omniscient God’s imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient means of achieving the goal you impose on him. Thank you for once more agreeing that we don’t know if we can apply human attributes to him, which negates your Jekyll’s belief that he is benevolent, enjoys creating, is interested in his creations and may want us to recognize and worship him, and which also negates your Hyde’s belief that your God certainly has no human attributes.

Introducing the brain

QUOTE: “The planarian is thus not only the first animal to possess a brain, but may be the ancestor of the vertebrate brain.”

DAVID: No organized brains in Ediacaran's found so far. They don't have heads. The gap is in the sudden organization into brains of substance.

So although the planarian is the first animal to possess a brain and may be the ancestor of the vertebrate brain, you know that it did not have a brain and cannot be the ancestor of the vertebrate brain. I get it. Is this your Jekyll or your Hyde speaking?

Time is faster on the moon (but still "introducing the brain")

DAVID: […] Our brain is much too big and complicated for the single purpose of survival. Darwin's emphasis on adaptions for survival driving evolution does not fit this example. In short, human beings cannot be explained by Darwin's theory of evolution.

dhw: Of course our brain has evolved beyond the single purpose of survival! […] The question [Darwin] tackles is how species originate. You have agreed that early sapiens used their brain mainly for survival (though they and some of our ancestors had already expanded the use to forms of art, decoration, and even ritual). Yes, we have now extended the use of our brains far, far beyond survival, but that does not alter the fact that we are still sapiens, i.e. that our species and our brains evolved from earlier species and brains. And that is the basis of Darwin’s theory. It’s called “common descent”.

Your totally irrelevant response was to repeat Adler’s proof of God’s existence, as dealt with on the evolution thread. Do you believe that your God designed our brain “de novo”, or do you believe that homo sapiens and his brain evolved from earlier species of homos and hominins and their brains (= common descent)?