New Miscellany 1: theodicy, evolution, cellular intelligence (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 26, 2025, 11:27 (9 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

dhw: You approved of my statement that good and evil are human inventions based entirely on what is good for US, while bacteria do what is good for them – whether we think it bad or not! You don’t seem to realize that free will is precisely what makes a free-for-all! You agree that your God gave humans and bacteria autonomy, and so we and they are responsible for our own ways of survival and for what we humans categorize as good or evil. And that is an answer to the problem of theodicy: God did not create good or evil. He simply created a free-for-all, in which every creature does what is best for itself.

This is a theory to explain theodicy. Please tell us why you reject it. Next I point out its relevance to theories of evolution:

Evolution

dhw: This applies both to behaviour (dog-eat-dog) and to design (responses to the environment). And so the free-for-all theory also removes the absurd illogicality of your own theory of evolution (see below), as organisms come and go in accordance with their autonomous ability or lack of ability to cope with changing conditions.

DAVID: A non-guided evolution did not have to pick bipedalism as a form. And it did not have to create the human brain. What 'changing conditions' forced either event?

Neither evolution nor your God “had to” do anything. But in your version, your God “had to” design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species that were irrelevant to his one and only purpose. You seem unable to join ideas together, so I’d better remind you that nobody knows what caused the origin of bi-pedal sapiens, but one possible explanation is known as the “savannah theory”, which we have been discussing for a few weeks now. I asked if you accepted its logic. You answered: “Yes the savannah theory is logical. But the real story is unknown.”

DAVID: Dog-eat-dog is an obvious event since all organisms must have a supply of food, but it tells us the arrival of humans required a large supply of food as a given from the broad scope of evolutionary results.

Dog-eat-dog is a free-for-all. Many animals require considerably larger quantities of food than we do. (An elephant needs about 150 times more!). 99.9% of the species you believe your God designed went extinct before we arrived, so I don’t know how they managed to satisfy our appetites.

DAVID: Calling 99.9% 'irrelevant' to the 0.1% survivors is nutty. How did the 0.1% appear without them?

Because as you have said yourself, the 0.1% were only descended from those branches of evolution which survived. For example, the only living organisms to have descended from the dinosaurs are birds. How many more times must we repeat what you have already agreed to, as follows:
dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

When will you stop disagreeing with yourself?

Cellular intelligence

DAVID: With a coded DNA conducting design, simple coding changes advance evolution.

dhw: […] Why is it unthinkable for you that the “code” is what creates the cell’s equivalent of a brain that processes all the information, decides what to do with it, and passes its instructions on to the rest of the community?

DAVID: That is exactly what DNA does from God's design.

Thank you for at last agreeing that your God might have designed autonomous cellular intelligence, instead of 3.8 billion years’ worth of preprogramming and ad hoc dabbling. Yet another red-letter day for the AgnosticWeb. As always, I shall record your agreement for future reference. (Ugh, see Part 2 for an immediate about-turn!)

DAVID: All of your theories have evolution producing organisms not needing God.

All my theories allow for a possible God as a possible designer. I am an agnostic. Please stop trying to divert attention away from your illogical theories by pretending that I am an atheist.