New Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Monday, February 03, 2025, 10:50 (31 days ago) @ David Turell

First life

dhw: Your belief that 70,000,000 years is a surprisingly short time and is evidence for God’s design comes from your belief that 70,000,000 years is a surprisingly short time and is evidence for God’s design. I understand! My point is that you have no criteria for your belief, which you and the author worded as if it were a statement of fact.

DAVID: The criteria is belief in God.

Of course it’s not. I might just as well ask why your all-knowing, all-powerful God took so LONG to develop life. Just as I can ask why your all-knowing, all-powerful God took so long and designed so many irrelevant species and ecosystems if his one and only purpose was to design us and our food.

T-cells and immunity

QUOTE: "'We discovered that ID3+ T cell formation could be promoted by specific inflammatory cues, potentially offering new strategies to boost the number of immune cells that excel at fighting cancer in patients..."

DAVID: a necessary fighter in the immune system, allowing for a long term resistance. It demonstrates 'purpose' as do all evolutionary processes like it. It supports a designer theory.

dhw: New strategies are essential whenever conditions change, and it supports the theory that cells have the intelligence to design them, the purpose being to enhance their chances of survival. Sadly, they are not always successful – e.g. millions of people are still dying from cancer - which means your God’s 3.8-billion-years-old instructions have failed. Another example of the inefficiency of your God.

DAVID: from our cancer society: in a nation of over 300 million about 600,000 will die this year of cancer. Where are dhw's millions? Let's see support.

You always seem to forget that your nation is not the only nation in the world. The 600,000 cases of God’s failed instructions are enough in themselves to prove the appalling inefficiency of your God’s so-called "instructions". As for the world, try this for size:

The American Cancer Society released its Global Cancer Statistics, 2024, report which estimates that approximately 20 million new cases of cancer were diagnosed in 2022 and approximately 9.7 million individuals died from cancer during that time. Moreover, the number of global cancer cases is predicted to reach 35 million by 2050.

How many more do you need to prove how inefficient your version of God is? Why don’t you consider the possibility that if he exists, he gave cells/cell communities the intelligence to make their own decisions, and to succeed or fail in one great free-for-all?

Theistic evolution vs. Darwinism: design evidence

DAVID: Back to a first cause discussion?

dhw: Precisely. And each possible first cause (God versus a mindless mass of ever changing matter and energy) raises unanswerable questions. Now please tell us why you think your all-powerful God was incapable of designing cells clever enough to do their own designing.

DAVID: Compare your brain to that of a living cell. Which one can see design and perform it.

I don’t understand your second sentence. My brain is a community of cell communities, which perform different functions but cooperate with one another. According to you, your God did in fact give our brains autonomous intelligence, which means he gave autonomy to the cell communities that form our brain. So why do you think he was incapable of doing the same for all other cells? Meanwhile, I trust you have now realized that Darwinism is not atheistic.

Return to David's theory of evolution III

DAVID: The article's point was only about the end of evolution, nothing more. Stop beating on my theory when it isn't present.

dhw: So why did you put it under the heading “Return to David’s Theory of Evolution III”?

DAVID: Under a discussion of evolution it fits.

dhw: OK. You prophesy that there will be no more evolution. Let's meet up in ten thousand years' time to see if you're right.

DAVID: If only we could.

Yeah. You can prophesy whatever you like. This discussion is pointless.

Extremophiles

DAVID: another study that demonstrates the tenacity of life. It is ecosystems all the way down. In a universe fine-tuned for life, the outcome is not surprising.

Yes, we’ve seen several articles on this subject. I don’t know about the universe being fine-tuned for life, since ours is the only planet we know that actually hosts it, but my response is different from yours, as I find all the diversity simply astonishing. In the context of your theory of evolution, I would say this astonishing diversity supports the concept of a massive free-for-all (perhaps initiated by a designer God), as cells and cell communities seek to survive in all sorts of environments. I have no idea why your God would want to create so many different ecosystems all the way down and all the billions of years back, solely in order to design and provide for us humans. But of course, you have no idea either.