New Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Friday, February 07, 2025, 19:06 (73 days ago) @ dhw

> First life

DAVID: The answer is really life is so complex and surprising, its sudden appearance is shocking. It becomes an issue of when did God start to do it.

dhw: Yes, life and evolution are both complex and surprising, especially as we know of no other life anywhere in the universe. But when the process started is NOT the issue we are discussing. The first organisms may have emerged 3.8 billion years ago or even earlier. The first “issue” is HOW it started, and the God theory is one explanation – it is not a fact. The issue you raised, however, was that 70,000,000 years (or 40,000,000 years) was a surprisingly short time for life to have developed, which you regard as evidence for the existence of your God. As we know of no other life, we have absolutely no criteria by which to judge the “normal” length of time it takes for life to appear. Your argument was totally without foundation.

It is without foundation for you, without God. The author and I had a surprising viewpoint considering how complex life is, how could it appear so quickly right after the severe Hadean period of formation. If so complex, how come so quick is a reasonable thought.

Evolution

dhw: If his one and only purpose was to design us and our food, but he found himself designing and then having to cull 99 out of 100 species because they had nothing to do with his one and only purpose, he was clearly an inefficient designer! Stop dodging!

You just duplicated my thought. Great designer of organisms, in a slow inefficient system.

T-cells and immunity

dhw: You believe that your God issued instructions for every immune response to every threat. The fact that the instructions failed in millions of cases can only mean that his instructions were inadequate. If a surgeon saves 9 patients but through his inefficiency kills one, do you congratulate him on grounds of proportionality?

You don't understand the cells at work. One mechanism makes the antibodies from one reactive system placing a foreign antigen into a destructive molecule. It uses the enemy to fight it.
Not endless specific instructions for each threat, just one.

The brain

DAVID: We know where thoughts are handled but not how neurons follow instructions to accommodate thinking.

dhw: What instructions? We are not discussing the source of consciousness, but the autonomy of organisms and their thinking. You believe we humans make our own designs and decisions without “instructions” from your God. Why do you insist that he could not possibly have given the same autonomy to other forms of life, right down to the single cell?

Your brainy cells are based on an unproven theory from the fact only bacteria code self DNA.

Fine-tuning

dhw: I had to look up CMB: “The Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is the cooled remnant of the first light that could ever travel freely throughout the Universe. This 'fossil' radiation, the furthest that any telescope can see, was released soon after the Big Bang.”
How does this come to mean that the 95% of the universe which no telescope can see is fine-tuned for life, although we have yet to discover life anywhere else in the universe?

As the CMB is the early blueprint for all the universe there are no odd ball areas. It is the same everywhere. In all fine-tuning discussions years ago, no one raised your point. You might want to join the multiverse folks.

DAVID: I don't slice up a continuous evolution as you do.

dhw: The continuity consists of the 1%. There is no continuity for the 99%. They went extinct. Remember?

DAVID: Yes, evolution 'extincted' them away to reach the surviving 0.1%. That's evidence of continuity.

dhw: Thank you for recognizing that the surviving 1% are the “continuity”. Every extinction by definition denotes discontinuity. You’ve got it (almost)!

The appearance of one generation after another or one species after another is not discontinuity when recognizing how evolution works.