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

by dhw, Sunday, March 30, 2025, 13:45 (5 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

DAVID: Come on, free-will or free actions from God ALLOW evil, obviously byproduct.

dhw: Free will ALLOWS what we call good and what we call evil. Decent David decides to earn a living by becoming a doctor, and Dirty Dave decides to become a robber. Billy bacterium survives by doing things we consider nice, and Basil bacterium survives by doing things we consider nasty. These are not “by-products of God’s good works” but products of autonomous decision-making! And since God does not dictate the decisions, clearly we have a free-for-
all.

DAVID: A side effect is the unintended result of any action. A byproduct is the same. Yours is a non-answer to the issue that God does not cause evil.

You now present us yet again with a God who produced something he never intended to produce. As with your theory of evolution, your omnipotent, omniscient, all-good God is a messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer. However, bacterial and human free will suggest that he wanted to create a free-for-all, in which his invention of the intelligent cell would autonomously provide the ever-changing history which is the reality of the past, present and, no doubt, the future. You agree that the concepts of good and evil are a human invention, based on what we think is good for us or bad for us, and what we regard as a bad bacterium is only doing what is good for itself. So if God gives you and them free will, is it you/bacteria or God who “cause evil”?

Evolution

DAVID: I'm disagreeing with you. What is here in all the ecosystems that support us, is analyzed to show how evolution is a dispensary process, while achieving its results.
And:
DAVID: When will you realize the statistics cover all of evolution in a generalized way, that the 0.1% CAME from the 99.9%. It does not consider specific lines.

dhw: When will you stop obfuscating? What do you mean by “came from” if you don’t mean “descended from”? Are you now denying that the history of evolution ["a dispensary process"] is one of different species or “lines” or “branches” that have come and gone?

DAVID: Of course we came from past ancestors. And so does every living thing on Earth. The survivors are 0.1% of all that ever lived. The 99.9% produced everything here now, humans and their food included.

An astonishing leap from logic to absurdity. Yes, every living thing has ancestors. But our/their ancestors were the 0.1% which survived. (I don’t actually like the precision of Raup’s figures, which nobody can possibly know, but we’ll stick to them for argument’s sake.) The 99.9% left no survivors – they were dead ends, e.g. 896 species of dinosaur died out without any survivors. Only 4 species survived in the form of birds, which = 0.44%. The rest did not “produce” anything that is here now. You have agreed:

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.

My question should actually have been “from 100%”, but your unequivocal answer made the correction!

dhw: ….and you have ignored the dinosaur example, as you strive to distract attention from your belief that your God is a messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer. Please explain what other reason you can give for ridiculing him in this way?

DAVID: Explained: evolution is a cumbersome way to create.
And:
DAVID: I obviously have no answer as to why God used evolution to evolve us. I am convinced we ere His purpose.

It is only cumbersome and inefficient if you impose a purpose on it and then insist that your God personally designed but had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that were irrelevant to his purpose! But you would rather ridicule your God than open your mind to any alternative theory, because as you once confessed: “I first choose a form of God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.”

Cellular intelligence

dhw: 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. […]

DAVID: I agree with your description recognizing it is all automatic, no thought involved.

dhw: You have quoted my argument […] that the code (perhaps God-given) might be the equivalent of a brain which acts autonomously, and you dare to pretend that a brain which independently processes, decides and instructs means a brain that does not independently process, decide and instruct. Next you will be telling me that the word “intelligent” means “without intelligence”. Please stop it.

DAVID: He coded DNA to give responses automatically.

dhw: More obfuscation. If something harms us, of course we automatically try to escape from it or find a way of removing it. And so our intelligence leads us to processing the new information, communicating with others, taking decisions, giving instructions…You agreed with my description of this process, as applied to cells/cell communities, and now you pretend that autonomous intelligence means automatic obedience.

DAVID: Not a pretense.

So you really believe that autonomous intelligence means automatic obedience! And “intelligent” presumably means “without intelligence”.