Return to David's theory of evolution, purpose & theodicy (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, September 19, 2024, 09:23 (13 hours, 25 minutes ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Any being can have patterns like us, as my dog example you’ve dismissed. You try to incorrectly humanize God.

dhw: So are you now going to accuse yourself of humanizing your dog???

DAVID: No.

Then please stop moaning that I “humanize” God when I agree with you that “of course He may have human-like attributes”.

DAVID: Adler has no idea of my thoughts about God. And you ignore schools of human thoughts about theology.

Thank you for dropping your pretence that Adler supports you. I had no idea that there were schools of human thoughts about theology that emphasized God’s inefficiency in fulfilling his one and only purpose (us and our food), or proposed that God wanted us to worship him but did not want us to worship him because he is selfless, or probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours but definitely doesn’t have thought patterns and emotions like ours because he is not human in any way. Please give us your references.

99.9% v 0.1%

dhw: […] you continue to ignore your very own agreement that the current 0.1% is NOT DESCENDED FROM ALL THE CREATURES THAT EVER LIVED BUT ONLY FROM THE 0.1% OF SURVIVORS. In other words, extinct species leave no descendants,

DAVID: The bold is insanity! Most extinct species left descendants. The tiny mouse-like mammals of dinosaur times are our extinct ancestors.

Yes, they were Raup’s 0.1% of survivors. (It may well be that they were more than 0.1%, but they would certainly have been a small minority.) I note that you have completely ignored your own theory that 100% of pre-Cambrian organisms (i.e. the first 3,000,000,000 years of life on earth) failed to produce a single ancestor Now would you please explain to us why you were insane when in reply to my question “Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of the creatures that ever lived?” you wrote: “No. From 0.1% surviving.”

dhw:... And I’m still waiting for the Raup quote which tells us that 99.9% of species “produced” the 0.1% of survivors. Previously all you told us was 99.9% losses, and 0.1% survivors.

DAVID: 'Loss' does not mean nothing followed!!!

Of course it doesn’t. The 0.1% of survivors went on to produce the new species, e.g. the conventional view that 4 species of dinosaur went on to produce approximately 10,000 species of birds. And the small number of surviving mammals went on to diversify into us and our fellow mammals.

Theodicy

dhw: This thread concerns your opposition to the concept of a free-for-all, despite your belief in freedom of action for bugs and humans and life in general with its freedom to have bad results.

DAVID: See today's entry about cellular actions on the edge of chaos.

Cells on the edge of chaos

QUOTE: “They have so many different functions. It’s incredible,” said Heller. Their conformational freedom facilitates a kind of functional promiscuity that provides cells with multiplexed and flexible recognition and response systems. In line with this, these malleable machines are often hubs for essential cellular processes, including gene regulation, cell division, molecular recognition, and cell signaling. “In all of those cases, you need something sensitive to its environment [that] needs to know when to switch on [and] when to switch off,” said Heller.

DAVID: […] This key point is why I always say mistakes will happen and dhw pounces on them to disparage God. God gave us life in this form because it is the only way life works. There is no take it or leave it here. It is an answer to theodicy in which perfection is demanded. It doesn't exist on the edge of chaos.

The quote covers the main point of this article, which is that far from being junk, these particular cells are extremely versatile in their different responses to different conditions. It all fits in neatly with Shapiro.

In the context of theodicy, you keep trying to confine the topic to the inevitability of mistakes in the life system your God was forced to invent (it was “the only way”) if he wanted to design us and our food. And you even have him trying to correct those mistakes, but failing and relying on us to help him. This has nothing to do with theodicy (the problem of evil) but is simply another example of an omnipotent, omniscient God’s inefficiency (as in his use of evolution). Meanwhile, you completely ignore your own statement that “What is fair is to blame God for natural disasters: earthquakes, terrible storms and bugs causing diseases”, and you ignore the fact that your God deliberately and knowingly gave humans the freedom to commit all their own evil deeds. You also emphasize the freedom of cells to ignore your God’s instructions, but you still refuse to accept the possibility that if your God exists, he designed life as a free-for-all and not a puppet show. A Garden of Eden would have been boring. Might this not be a possible answer to your question: "Why would a benevolent God deliberately create the chaos of a murderous free-for-all?"