More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, July 15, 2024, 11:34 (55 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I know evil exists and we all know good cannot exist without evil. Back to proportionality.

So your omniscient God created or allowed evil because he was incapable of designing all-goodness and of preventing the evil he knew his humans would cause, which means that despite his omnipotence, he was not omnipotent. But apparently the existence of evil still means that God is all-good because there is more good than evil. It’s a wonder your Jekyll and Hyde haven’t strangled each other by now.

Back to David’s “schizophrenia”

DAVID: A perfect God picked His preferred method to evolve us, and He did it. Our human analysis notes evolution is a cumbersome method. God didn't ask for our opinion.

Then why have you expressed your opinion that your omnipotent, omniscient God’s only purpose was us, that he deliberately and knowingly designed and then had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with what in your opinion was his purpose, and why do you present us with your opinion that your perfect designer picked an imperfect and inefficient method to fulfil that purpose? Why can’t you see that your opinion is a complete mess of contradictions and might just possibly be wrong?

Jumping gene controls

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Your usual distortion of evolutionary statistics. As usual, you ignored the issue of the lack of directionality/purpose in Darwin theory.

There is no distortion. You have agreed that 99.9% of past life forms did not lead to those now present. I note that you have now bracketed directionality and purpose together, after I had asked you to explain the difference. Darwin’s theory is that all species except the very first cells evolved from preceding species. The purpose of all the changes is survival. He did not set out to write a book about the origin of life or to discuss the existence of God and what God’s purpose might have been for creating life.

Genome complexity
QUOTE: "[…] 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”.

No response.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Cells can simply follow genome directions. The only real intelligence we see requires neurons.

How do you define “real” intelligence? Why can’t “simply following genome instructions” mean that the instructions are issued by an autonomous intelligence within the cell? Neurons are also cells. Bacteria do not have them, but their ability to outwit humans is well proven – or have you now decided that God keeps telling them what to do?