New Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Monday, February 10, 2025, 08:32 (24 days ago) @ David Turell

First life

DAVID: As we learn time periods in the billions regarding the appearance of life, we see how long it took in reference to the Big Bang beginning, but then on Earth right after the Hadean period. Yes, we do not know life's time period for design but considering the context of timing it's appearance seems brief.

This is a long-winded way of repeating that you think 9.2000,000,000 years is a short time for the appearance of a planet that can sustain life, and 70,000,000 (or 40,000,000) years is a short time for life to have appeared, and the shortness supports the concept of a designer. How do you know the normal time for the appearance of a life-sustaining planet and for life itself?

Evolution

DAVID: […] Great designer of organisms, in a slow inefficient system.

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

DAVID: God. Again, why not direct creation? Didn't happen as God chose His method.

dhw: And the designer of an inefficient system is an inefficient designer. You have asked a highly pertinent question, but you simply refuse to accept that your God (if he exists) might have had other reasons for starting evolution than us and our food..

DAVID: The only goal we know is humans. Don't invent 'facts' from your mind.

It is not a “fact” that humans were his one and only goal. Your refusal to believe he might have had a different purpose, and/or used a different method for creating life and evolution’s history, including the 99 out 100 species that had no connection with us and our food, leads you to the conclusion that he is a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer. I’d say this is a pretty weird reflection of omnipotence and omniscience.

T-cells and immunity

DAVID: Explicitly: DNA instructions make a mechanical mechanism that repeatedly identify enemy, take a protein piece and imbed it into an antibody that kills. Same event over and over. Automatically recognizing self from not-self'.

So every enemy is identical, and there should be no problem when, say, flu or malaria or Covid or AIDS come to kill us. Same event over and over. A “mechanical mechanism” has been given instructions by...DNA? So what instructions were given by God 3.8 billion years ago? Please answer. And how come these instructions from an omniscient and omnipotent God fail, with millions of people dying? And please let us know what you mean by the “degree of adaptability” you think God did give to cells if it is not the autonomous means of processing new information and making decisions on how to use it.

The spliceosome

QUOTE: The scientists therefore assume that the mechanisms for recognizing and sorting out faulty spliceososmes have remained largely unchanged over the course of evolution.

dhw: […] I agree that the “mechanisms” must have been present from the start of evolution. And I suggest that “recognition” and “sorting out” require some form of intelligence.

DAVID: The intelligence of the designer's instructions for action.

Does this mean he gave cells the mechanisms with which to act, or he tells the cells exactly what they have to do in each individual case, as above?

dhw: 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.

Ignored.

DAVID: Same old theodicy attack not worth replying.

First you challenged my reference to “millions”, then you wanted us to focus only on people who didn’t die, as if "proportionality" made the evil disappear, and your basic solution to the problem of theodicy is to pretend that there is no problem.

Fine-tuning

dhw: Please […] explain to me why YOU are so sure that because the 5% of the universe which we know is “fine-tuned” for life, the 95% that we don’t know must also be fine-tuned for life. And do you think the stars and systems that have gone extinct were also fine-tuned for life?

DAVID: Fine tuning is recognizing all the physical factors that allow this universe to exist. Based on the CMB no oddball exist!!! Yes, all fine tuned to exist and allow life.

We know that life exists, and so of course the universe, no matter what it consists of, can be said to have allowed life to live. And we know that our part of the universe is “fine-tuned” for life because we live in it. But 95% per cent of the universe is not known to us, so how do you know it is “fine-tuned for life” unless we find life in those parts of the universe that we do not know?