More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, July 20, 2024, 08:19 (124 days ago) @ David Turell

Back to David’s theory of evolution

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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: You misunderstand. On Earth we evolve many items. That is my reference.

I’ve understood. And I’ve asked you how many earthly items have been invented by omnipotent inventors etc., as bolded! If you can’t tell me, that is because your reference is totally inappropriate! We only know of one evolution which you assume has been invented by an omnipotent, omniscient, yet messy and inefficient God.

Genome complexity

dhw: 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!!!

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Don't confuse two thoughts! With our free will I believe God does not know what we will do. [...]

I’ll rephrase my objection. Your God would not have enjoyed our human development if he knew all of it in advance. So don’t you think an unpredictable evolution might possibly have been more enjoyable for him than knowing all the new species, lifestyles, strategies, natural wonders etc. 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: […] 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!).

dhw: 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?

DAVID: The quote says it is all God's doing. Accept it as God's unexplainable work. I do.

I know that you are happy to accept whatever you think is God’s work, even though it makes no sense to you. You start with the God you wish for.

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."

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

DAVID: 'Natural preservation' is exactly on point. Natural selection is totally a nebulous, attractive ploy creating nothing.

Natural preservation doesn’t create anything either. Both terms boil down to exactly the same meaning: Nature determines which life forms will survive. Silly word game.

Biochemical controls (99.9% versus 0.1%)

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: The 99.9% are the ancestors of the living 0.1%!!!

So 696 dinosaurs which had no descendants were the ancestors of current species. Only the four species which evolved into current species were not the ancestors of current species. Astonishing!

The role of viral DNA (Theodicy)

DAVID: If God is viewed as a designer, He introduced viruses as helpful design components for DNA evolution. dhw will complain about the trouble some of them cause. The answer is God's good works far outweigh the bad side effects.

Theodicy does not question your God’s good works – it asks why an all-good God would knowingly invent or allow evil, such as a flu virus that killed 50 million people. Harping on the good does not explain or justify the bad, given the conventional view of God as all-good, omnipotent and omniscient.