More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 03, 2024, 01:03 (14 days ago) @ dhw

Black holes needed for life

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.

dhw: 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.

It makes perfect sense to me! God designed it so it had to be that way. You second guess GOD!

Intelligent cells

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.

dhw: 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.

From above please reread: " survivors, the 0.1% which came from the 99.9% extinct."

God and evolution: weaverbirds

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

dhw: 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.

Makes little sense. Good and bad had the same DNA programming.

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.

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

OK