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

by dhw, Saturday, April 05, 2025, 10:25 (15 hours, 12 minutes ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

DAVID: God's gift of free will and freedom of action both allowed evil to appear. God cannot control evil people and bacteria should not be restricted in freedom of action.

You’ve got it! If God exists, he deliberately gave them freedom of will and action to do whatever they wanted to do. He did not give them instructions.

DAVID: Pure byproducts of good works. This does not make God incompetent.

You've lost it again. You have defined “by-product” as the unintended result of any action. If he unintentionally created evil, he did not deliberately give us and bacteria the freedom of will and action to do what we and they want to do. And you think that if your God unintentionally causes the deaths of millions of people, that is a sign of his competence. But your sef-contradiction gets even worse. From Part 2:

dhw: “an organism which can outwit humans as it finds ways of countering our attempts to kill it must have a form of autonomous intelligence, as you have acknowledged under “theodicy”. After all, your form of God would hardly have given it instructions to murder us, would he?

DAVID: I doubt it.

dhw: And the more you doubt it, the more obvious it should be to you that bacteria have the autonomous intelligence to work out their own ways of survival.

DAVID: I think bacteria edit DNA by instructions.

You think your God deliberately gave them free will and freedom of action, but unintentionally gave them free will and free action, but then in fact gave them instructions on how to murder us. (They edit their DNA so that they can counter our efforts to stop them killing us.)

DAVID: Please redefine free-for-all in your terms.

A free-for-all means that everyone is free to do exactly what they want to do - what you have called freedom of will and action: i.e. autonomy. Humans and bacteria are able autonomously to act as they wish to act. Autonomously means without any input from outside themselves, which is the exact opposite of acting under instructions.

Evolution

DAVID: Evolution is a continuum. The 99.9% extinct produced the 0.1% surviving.

dhw: 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: I'm looking at overall statistics, not any single examples.

Why do you ignore examples which show the absurdity of your statements? Please tell me what overall statistics prove that if a species has no descendants, it produces descendants. Only a species that survives can produce descendants. You didn’t even need examples to agree. I asked you “Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived?” And you replied: “No. From the 0.1% surviving.”

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:

Under “Origin of life: increasing complexity”:

QUOTE: "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."

dhw: [..]The article talks of “repurposing” not of purposelessness. Explanations range from keeping dinosaurs warm to camouflage.

DAVID: All pure Darwinian guesswork. Feathers came and birds appeared is the evidence we have.

Feathers came before birds appeared. What evidence have you that they were NOT used? You pretended later that the article showed some kind of foresight on the part of evolution. It doesn’t. Feathers were your very poor example.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Much simpler with God as designer.

Another of your own oversimplifications. Why is it simpler to believe in a sourceless, eternal super-mind (and especially your inefficient, incompetent version) than in an eternal mixture of matter and energy producing an infinite number of possible combinations which eventually hit upon the right one to start the free-for-all? If you want simplicity, you might as well join me in saying "we don't know"!