More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, September 02, 2024, 11:38 (14 days ago) @ David Turell

Black holes needed for life

DAVID: every part of a galaxy has reasons to exist. dhw complains God didn't need such a large universe to make life appear for us.

dhw: What makes you think that every galaxy contains life? If you think it does, then clearly your God did not create the universe for the single purpose of creating us. If you think it doesn’t, you are left with the same problems: Why all the galaxies just for us and our food? Why the 99.9% irrelevant species, just for us and our food? […]

DAVID: Every galaxy does not have life, I think. All the other galaxies are there from God's desired construction. Why should everything God does make sense to us? What is obvious from studies of life's biochemistry is that a designer is necessary.

My question is not about life’s biochemistry, which I accept as an argument for design, but about the billions of presumably lifeless galaxies which you claim your God designed for the sole purpose of creating us and our food – a theory which clearly makes no sense to you and a problem which if anything supports the atheist view that, given these vast numbers, the odds are that eventually chance would provide the first primitive life forms we know.

Intelligent cells

DAVID: I can never bend to your hopeless wish for intelligent cells that can speciate.

dhw: Mine is not a wish. The theory provides a very feasible explanation for all the random comings and goings of species, while at the same time allowing for your God as the inventor of the system. But of course it contradicts YOUR wish that your God should be in total control (though not of murderous molecules, bacteria, viruses and humans) and should only have wanted to design us and our food, although he deliberately designed and then had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to us and our food.

DAVID: He culled nothing. Everything extant is here to serve us humans.

dhw: Even if your second anthropocentric theory were true (to “serve us”), what is extant represents 0.1% of what has existed, and it is you who used the expression “cull” in relation to the irrelevant 99.9% (at those times when you agreed that they were NOT our ancestors).

DAVID: We are part of the survivors, the 0.1% which came from the 99.9% extinct. Raup's lumped statistics is my way of viewing evolution.

It was you who used the expression “cull”, and Raup does NOT say that the 99.9% were the ancestors of the 0.1%, and you have agreed that they were not. All dealt with on the “evolution” thread.

Gaps are very real

This turned into a repeat of your attempt to prove that 100% of non-ancestral pre-Cambrian species and 99.9% of non-ancestral dinosaur species add up to 99.9% of ancestral species.

DAVID: Pre-Cambrian forms had the living biochemistry the Cambrians used. Why must I repeat this?? From above: "We are part of the survivors, the 0.1% which came from the 99.9% extinct. Raup's lumped statistics is my way of viewing evolution."

All life forms use “living biochemistry”, and the question we are dealing with is why a God whose only aim was to produce us and our contemporary species would have designed and culled 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us, i.e. were NOT our ancestors. “Why must I repeat this?” All covered on the “evolution” thread.

God and evolution: weaverbirds

dhw: I can’t help wondering why you think your God found it necessary to design these particular nests for these particular birds,[…]. Do you think other bird species were intelligent enough to design their own nests and pass the information on to subsequent generations without your God popping the appropriate programme into their DNA?

DAVID: No, birds produce programmed nests identifying species.

dhw: I see. Either your God dabbled non-stop, or 3.8 billion years ago, he programmed every single species of bird and every single “species” of nest, along with every other species, extant and extinct, every other “home”, lifestyle, strategy etc., with the sole exception of the behaviour of murderous molecules, viruses, bacteria and humans.

DAVID: All of God's good has some bad side effects.

Two separate issues here: You stand by your theory that he dabbled or preprogrammed all of the above, so no species apart from the nasty ones have ever had the intelligence to design their homes, means of self-defence, strategies for catching prey, or for surviving changing conditions. Only the murderous ones were given such autonomous intelligence.

Weird forms in Mono Lake

dhw: A wonderful example of cells forming a community. As you yourself often comment: “not by chance”, since clearly their communities have been successful in the struggle for survival. The above quotes do indeed seem to bridge a gap – from intelligent individual cells to communities of intelligent individual cells.

DAVID: Perhaps a God-given capacity.

Yes, the theory of cellular intelligence allows for God as its designer.