New Miscellany: fine tuning, theodicy, evolution (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 18, 2025, 17:38 (16 days ago) @ dhw

Fine-tuning

DAVID: This universe will allow life wherever it is habitable. We agree but you don't like it served up the way I view it.

dhw: I don’t like demonstrably false statements, and the fact that they are 30 years old does not make them any more acceptable. Yes, the universe will allow life wherever it is habitable, but a) the entire universe is not habitable, and (b) even if a place is habitable, that still doesn’t mean it’s fine-tuned for life, because the biochemical components of which all living things are made must also be fine-tuned. If you now accept that your statement (“the entire universe is fine-tuned for life to appear”) is demonstrably false, then we can agree and close the subject.

The definition of habitability means all of life's requirements are available! What is your problem? My position still stands.

Theodicy

dhw: The subject is not my agnosticism but the question how an all-good God can produce evil. Your answer is to put your head in the sand and ignore evil, or to inform us that your all-powerful God is powerless, but you are happy. Stop dodging.

Round and round. Stopping point.

Evolution

DAVID: This is your usual distortion of an evolutionary process analysis.

Your analysis is that your God’s only purpose was to produce us and our food, and in order to do so he had to design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us.
Listen to yourself:

dhw: Do you believe that we and our foods are directly descended from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

dhw: What other reason do you have for ridiculing your God as a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer?

Some strange branches were dead ends

Polar bears’ deicing methods
DAVID: I wonder about diving birds in the Arctic and other animals who are partially aquatic in their lifestyles. The evolutionary process has a solution for every challenge.

dhw: I agree. One might conclude that the cell communities of which all life forms are made have minds of their own (possibly created originally by your God) which enable them to find their own individual solutions to the problems posed by their respective environments.

DAVID: Only if they are guided by a designing brain.

dhw: By which I presume you mean God gives them instructions for every new response to every new situation. You just can’t conceive of the possibility that other life forms, starting with bacteria, have an intelligence of their own. Do you think murderous bacteria are guided by your God to devise defences against our human efforts to stop the killing? Please answer.

I have no idea. I think the bacteria are mistakenly in the wrong place. They can become resistant because we use antibiotics from nature which they recognize. God may have initially designed them, but has no further interaction.