More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, July 19, 2024, 08:39 (125 days ago) @ David Turell

Schizophrenia
dhw: Your two-way approach leads you to tell us that your God is benevolent but is not benevolent, may want us to worship him but doesn’t, may enjoy creating but doesn’t, probably has human attributes but doesn’t. Not schizophrenic?

DAVID: God has one personality. My view of Him is in two ways does not make Him schizophrenic.

If your view of him is that he is benevolent but not benevolent, then of course your view makes him schizophrenic.

Back to David’s theory of evolution
dhw: You have just agreed there is only one evolution, and if your God is the first cause, who decided that the only way to create humans plus food was to create and then cull 99.9 out of 100 species because they had no connection with humans plus food? He did, incomprehensibly, which is why you keep ridiculing him as imperfect; cumbersome and inefficient, though your other self insists that he is perfect.

DAVID: Yes, there is only one evolution of life, but evolutionary design processes exist in many ways and cull what is not wanted when reviewed.

How many evolutionary design processes are created by omnipotent, omniscient inventors who deliberately create designs that have no connection with what they want to produce and who already know that they will have to dump 99.9% of their work?

Genome complexity
Please confirm: do you think your God has given cells precise instructions on what to do in whatever situations may arise for the rest of time? Yes or no will do.

DAVID: Yes!!!

Thank you. So the whole of life’s history is predestined, because it has been preprogrammed by a God who “would not have enjoyed our development if he knew all of it in advance” but presumably would have enjoyed all the other evolutionary developments, although he knew them in advance.

How we got water

DAVID: Our [water] supply suggests the Earth was especially designed for life to appear.

dhw: Does that mean your God specially designed the rest of the universe for life not to appear?

DAVID: My guess is yes. See: https://evolutionnews.org/2024/07/on-natural-theology-and-natural-revelation/

QUOTE: "Looking up at the external universe in all its terrifying infinity and sterility it would be all too tempting to agree with philosopher Bertrand Russell, his self-confessed disciple Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and others of like mind that the whole extra-terrestrial realm is little but a meaningless chaos where chance alone reigns supreme. Yet the nihilist sense of our having been involuntarily flung into the midst of some unchoreographed theater of the absurd is swiftly offset by observing the habitable zone of our own planet whose superabundance of vibrant life forms unarguably makes it a place of cosmic exceptionalism (albeit for reasons which might remain eternally debatable!).

I think most of us would accept that our planet and life are exceptional. How does that explain the sterility of the rest of the universe?

Natural selection
QUOTE: "[…] Sir Charles Lyell had warned Darwin (in company later with Alfred Russel Wallace) as early as 1860 that there was no such thing as natural selection, only natural preservation. Darwin’s ostensibly astounding discovery was in reality a misleading misnomer: it was not a discriminating force."

Natural selection simply means that nature selects which life forms are to be preserved. Your reviewer is playing silly word games.

Biochemical controls
DAVID: The ancestors of these forms that were culled out in their development are part of the same 99.9% dhw always considers unnecessary.

dhw: Of course the ancestors of living forms were necessary! Otherwise the living forms would not be here! But the ancestors of living forms are part of the 0.1% that survived the culling [...] as you have agreed, and as I keep repeating ad nauseam:

dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all the creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

dhw: We were talking then of current species, but of course we do not count bacteria as food. I don’t know if the generally accepted figure of 99.9% extinction also applies to bacteria. Our example was dinosaurs, of which only four species out of 700 were ancestors of living forms.

DAVID: The 0.1% surviving came from the 99.9% culled.

So the 0.1% of survivors came from the 696 species of dinosaurs that had no descendants. And there was me thinking that the only descendants were from the four species of dinosaurs that had descendants. Apparently in your topsy-turvy world, our ancestors are species that had no descendants.

An alternative to evolution
QUOTE: "At half a millimeter long—about the width of a human hair—bdelloid rotifers might be easy to miss. But these tiny freshwater critters are some of the toughest animals on the planet. Comprised entirely of females, they’re particularly notorious for “stealing” genes from other organisms. That ability has allowed them to go 40 million years without sex [...]”

Absolutely stunning! Regardless of one’s religious or non-religious beliefs, one can only gasp at the ingenious methods of survival that organisms come up with. Nature’s Wonders!