New Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Saturday, February 08, 2025, 09:01 (26 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.

DAVID: 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.

In addition to my objection above: If there is an omniscient and omnipotent God who created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, and planet Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and his only aim was to produce us and our food, I could ask why it took him so long (9.2000,000,000 years and countless stars and solar systems) to produce a planet suitable for life. (Same problem as below.) If there is no God, we’re still none the wiser as to how long it ought to take for life to develop. An atheist would presumably say that the chance combination could have occurred at any time.

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!

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

And who, according to you, designed the inefficient system?

T-cells and immunity
DAVID: Your usual complaint has missed the reply of proportionality of side effects of His good works.

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?

DAVID: 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.

You told us “God gave all organisms a degree of adaptability to use.” Every new threat demands a different response, so I take this “adaptability” to mean the ability or mechanism or intelligence to adapt their responses accordingly. What else could it mean? Meanwhile, the death of millions denotes the inefficiency of your God’s “instructions”, whatever you mean by that. The bad doesn’t disappear just because his instructions have led to more good than bad.

The brain

dhw: 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?

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

Your belief that there is a God who preprogrammed all responses 3.8 billion years ago is an unproven theory based on no facts at all.

Fine-tuning

dhw (quoting definition of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB): “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?

DAVID: 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.

For all we know, ours is the oddball area, and indeed you keep telling us how unique it is! I don’t know who raised what points years ago, but please explain to me why YOU are so sure that the 95% of the universe that we do not know is fine-tuned for life.

Evolution

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

Evolution works by species developing from earlier species in a continuous process which ends when a particular line of descent becomes extinct. You agree that only 1% of species have survived continuously to form the current population, and that should mark the end of this discussion.

Emmy Noether

DAVID: she has not been publicized until now. She is Einstein in female form. The Nazi's forced her to come to Bryn Mawr College in the U.S in 1933. She died in 1935. If she had survived, I can imagine imagine her working with the atomic bomb development group.

I won’t pretend to understand the work that she did, but I find her personal story rather moving. Thank you.