More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, July 14, 2024, 11:54 (55 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

DAVID: You accumulate from small numbers until they are large enough to complain about. The amount of good is too enormous by comparison.

dhw: The subject of theodicy is not how to measure the proportion of good to evil, but how to explain the evil created or allowed by a supposedly all-good God. Stop dodging.

DAVID: It is not a dodge but the standard answer. your analysis of statistics is not mine.

I have offered you two “standard” answers (evil is the result of God giving us free will, and evil is God’s punishment for our sins), and you have offered us your own answers that evil is God’s challenge to us and makes life more interesting. The proportion of good to evil does not explain the existence of evil. Stop dodging.

Back to David’s “schizophrenia”

dhw: Either your God does or does not have human attributes. But instead of saying a neutral 50/50, one minute you say he probably/possibly does have them, and the next minute you say he certainly doesn’t have them. All because you believe in a theory of evolution that makes no sense even to you, but you can’t bear to admit that it might be wrong, and you can’t bear to admit that my own logical theistic theories of evolution might be right!

DAVID: Your humanized God is a direct reflection of your self-image.

I see no reason to assume that your perfect God would choose the imperfect, inefficient method you impose on him in order to serve the purpose you impose on him, when the reality of life’s history shows that a perfect God could have produced the same history perfectly and efficiently if he had had a different purpose or method. I myself am not a creator of life’s evolution. I simply offer you logical alternatives to your nonsensical theory. You, on the other hand, start with a form of God you wish to believe in – so your God is a reflection of your wishes, though why you wish for an imperfect, inefficient designer is beyond my comprehension, except that perhaps you wish you hadn’t forced yourself into such a cul de sac.

Jumping gene controls

DAVID: Everything in the genome is there for a reason. Purposelessness in evolution does not exist, except in Darwin's theory.

dhw: You can hardly expect Darwin to have known about all the latest discoveries concerning DNA! And I have no idea why you think the drive for survival means purposelessness. Darwin does talk of vestigial structures, but as far as I remember, these are only mentioned as proof of common descent. […]. Please explain why the purpose of improving chances of survival is not a purpose.

DAVID: Again, avoiding the obvious issue of the directionality of evolution, totally absent in Darwin theory.

Please explain the difference between “directionality” and “purpose” when applied to evolution, and how the deliberate designing of (and then having to cull) 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to the purpose can denote directionality.

Genome complexity

"[…] those little regulatory RNAs are generally too small to carry enough information for their unions to be very selective; they too work collectively, arriving at a decision, as it were, by committee. (dhw’s bold)

dhw: […] You constantly bombard us with your belief that cells are nothing more than the mindless recipients of your God’s instructions. Interestingly, you also sneer at the theory that cells form interactive, thought-processing, decision-making communities, which you have scathingly called “committees”, and here, lo and behold, we have an article which actually compares their work to that of “committees”. But there is more to come in your comment:

DAVID: We can now see them as "Barbara McClintock in recognising that the genome is a responsive, reactive system, not some passive data bank: as McClintock called it, a ‘highly sensitive organ of the cell’". So, it is a swarm of regulating ncRNA's in loose control that works! Yes, surprising and highly suggests a designer at work.

dhw: As you are well aware, Barbara McClintock was a pioneering champion of the theory that cells are intelligent entities. However, one can argue that the intelligence of cells working together as cooperative communities is evidence of design.

DAVID: I brought her back just for your pleasure. Thanks for mentioning design fits.

Very kind of you. That does not alter the fact that “design” can be explained by the theory of the intelligent cell, which you once claimed belonged to the past but which appears again and again in the articles you kindly reproduce for us.