New Miscellany 1: theodicy, evolution, origin of life (General)

by dhw, Friday, April 04, 2025, 13:33 (14 hours, 19 minutes ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

DAVID: I fully accept that evil is a by-product of God's works. I equate free-for-all as another term for dog-eat-dog.

You defined by-product as “the unintended result of any action”, which makes your God into the creator of evil through sheer incompetence. You then did a complete about-turn and wrote: “Evil is the result, as you state, of freedom of action or free will”, which you agreed applied to bacteria as well as to humans. You are now “accepting” the incompetent version you rejected, and rejecting the free-for-all you accepted. Please stop it. I have no objection to “dog-eat-dog”, which sums up every organism’s struggle for survival, regardless of whether what they do is good or bad in our eyes. The free-for-all theory means that your God did not create what we humans regard as evil, and is not the incompetent blunderer you have once again turned him into. Please stop changing your mind and contradicting yourself.

Evolution

DAVID: You cannot deny the 99% extinct produced us, the 0.1% survivors.

dhw: Of course I deny it, and so did you. How many more times must I repeat the quote?

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.

dhw: Example: 396 species of dinosaur left no descendants. The only survivors were the four species that evolved into modern birds. How does that come to mean that we and our food are descended from the 396 species that left no descendants?

[Correction: I got the figures wrong – I think it should read 696 species – maybe even more. I don’t have time to do the research again, but it makes no difference. The vast majority of dinosaurs died without leaving descendants.]

DAVID: Your usual slice and dice. Evolution is a continuum. The 99.9% extinct produced the 0.1% surviving.

Yet again: The continuum is provided by the 0.1% that survive. Species which go extinct without any descendants do not produce descendants, and dead ends do not create a continuum!

DAVID: Has it occurred to you to question the appearance of feathers on dinosaurs before any flight happened? The history of life is filled with such events. See the new entry I'm creating:

QUOTES from “Origin of life: increasing complexity”:

"Yet finding new uses for existing components is precisely what evolution does. Feathers did not evolve for flight, for example. This repurposing reflects how biological evolution is jerry-rigged, making use of what’s available."

So why do you assume that feathers evolved for no purpose before they were used for flight? The article talks of “repurposing” not of purposelessness. Explanations range from keeping dinosaurs warm to camouflage.

DAVID: many such events occur in evolution, A designer explains all of this. An extraordinary article I had to eviscerate. The whole piece is amazing.

Thank you for eviscerating it. No thanks for distorting its message.

QUOTES: biology is just one example of evolution. “There is a more universal description that drives the evolution of complex systems.”

“the increase in functional information was not always gradual. Sometimes it would happen in sudden jumps.” (David’s bold)

Ricard Solé of the Santa Fe Institute thinks such jumps might be equivalent to phase transitions in physics, such as the freezing of water or the magnetization of iron: They are collective processes with universal features, and they mean that everything changes, everywhere, all at once. In other words, in this view there’s a kind of physics of evolution — and it’s a kind of physics we know about already.

FINAL QUOTE: "[…] does this mean that life itself, and perhaps consciousness and higher intelligence, is inevitable in the universe? That would run counter to what some biologists have thought. The eminent evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was doomed because the appearance of humanlike intelligence is “utterly improbable.” After all, he said, if intelligence at a level that leads to cultures and civilizations were so adaptively useful in Darwinian evolution, how come it only arose once across the entire tree of life? (David’s bold)

The main thrust is that the researchers see biological evolution as just one example of natural complexification in other spheres. It is the reviewer who adds the final, sceptical quote, and I must confess I find the analogy between freezing water/magnetized iron and the evolution of life extremely far-fetched. As I see it, the new theory does not in any way support the concept of divine design, but at the same time it seems to me to completely ignore the unique complexity of life and the astonishing, unsolved mysteries of its origin and evolution. I like the reviewer’s attempt to restore the balance.