More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 02, 2024, 11:52 (16 days ago) @ David Turell

Early mammalian evolution

DAVID: What I have bolded is a clear example of purely human wishes driving your 'God'.

dhw: Please stop contradicting yourself. You have just hypothesized that your God is still interested in his creations, so why do you dismiss the proposal that he created life because he wanted something interesting to watch?

DAVID: God is not driven by self-needs. He simply creates.

You keep yammering on about “need”. You agree that he not only creates but is interested in his creations. Why do you think it is illogical for a God to enjoy creating and be interested in what he creates, rather than to create zombie-like without any feelings at all about what he is doing?

DNA hunts pathogens

dhw: So the bugs outsmart the omniscient God who created them? […]

DAVID: That is why theodicy exists for discussion. The bugs God produced are pretty smart as designed.

dhw: The bugs outsmart your God, but you prefer that explanation to the possibility that your God gave cells the means to design their own defences, and so if they failed, it was their fault and not his.

DAVID: Yes.

So bugs are smarter than God. No wonder you stand alone in the theological world.

Biochemical controls

dhw: Why do you assume that your all-powerful God was forced to design something full of mistakes which he did not wish to design? If he had wanted a Garden of Eden, free from disease and all other evils, do you think he was incapable of designing it? You imply that your perfect, omnipotent God was not omnipotent (as well as being imperfect and inefficient in his use of evolution).

DAVID: See as an answer today's new entry.

Philip Goff’s article is covered on the evolution thread.

Walking fish and The bowerbird concert hall

DAVID: Every ecosystem is important on Earth. They all interlock.

Important for what? Why, according to you, was every species in every ecosystem for the first 3+ billion years of life on Earth “important” for us humans and our food? Why are the walking fish and the concert hall so important for us that your God had to design them?

Unconscious pattern learning

DAVID: our brain is built to help us, even in advance as I have presented before. This is a conceptual form of planning, not likely to be developed by natural selection in advance of the need. Only a designer fits.

dhw: I’m not sure what you mean by “conceptual planning”. The article simply covers predictions based on experience, a process which we obviously share with our fellow creatures when we all take actions to cope with the expected repetitions of “patterns” (e.g. anticipating the onset of winter).

DAVID: How does natural selection create a helpful brain? Implies purpose.

Who’s talking about natural selection, which never created anything? The article describes how past experience may lead to predictions about the future, and I have pointed out that we and our fellow animals may therefore take action in anticipation of the repetitions. What do you mean by “conceptual planning”?

ORIGIN OF LIFE

QUOTE: "Researchers have discovered a plausible evolutionary setting in which nucleic acids—the fundamental genetic building blocks of life—could enable their own replication, possibly leading to life on Earth."

DAVID: this is a totally laughable waste of grant money. IF DNA appeared in this setting DNA strands will congregate near the interface of gas and water. IT did, which means that IF naturally appearing DNA was in this setting with the correct enzyme then may be a miracle would occur and life would appear. But all we see is lab supplied DNA and enzyme. The wole field is a cesspool of lost grant money supplied by our tax money.

I must say, the alarm bells rang when I read the quote above, with its immediate qualification of “possibly”, but it needs a scientist to point out the details of what would be required. Scientists in a lab, consciously manipulating materials to create a possible formula for the origin of life (though nothing is proven), can hardly be described as “convincing evidence” (the term they use later) for a possible explanation of abiogenesis. My thanks to David for the scientific details.