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

by dhw, Sunday, April 06, 2025, 11:57 (2 days 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.

dhw: 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: Your comment applies to humans. Bacteria modify their DNA to a slight degree, but generally follow instructions.

Here are some of your other comments: 1) “Humans and bacteria create evil.” 2) “Evil is the result, as you state, of freedom of action or free will.” 3) dhw: Your God would hardly have given it [the bacterium] instructions to murder us, would he? DAVID: I doubt it.

So make up your mind: did God give bacteria the freedom of action or free will to murder us, or do they act under his instructions?

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID:[…]. We have free will and bacteria have some freedom of action, all of which produces evil.

You have ignored the fact that your “by-product” argument blames your God for his incompetence in producing something he never intended to produce.

DAVID: I still think bacteria follow instructions in surviving.

Bacteria can survive by being nice to us or by murdering us. You believe your God didn’t want bacteria to be “restricted in freedom of action”, and so he deliberately gave them freedom of will and action to survive by being nice to us or by murdering us. But he didn’t, because their freedom was the result of his incompetence (unintended by-product). Except that they aren’t free because they follow his instructions when they survive by being nice to us or by murdering us. I defy anyone to make sense of this.

Evolution

DAVID: I'm not discussing evolution at the nitty-gritty level you use. Of course species die out. I use an outside view of the whole process as Raup did.

Raup gave us the figures of 99.9% extinction and 0.1% survival. You interpret that as meaning we are descended from every single creature that ever lived, including the 99.9% that produced no descendants. How can creatures that produced no descendants have produced us? You agree that they couldn’t, but you still insist that “the 99% extinct produced us”. Please stop it.

Designing for the future

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:

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’s bold)

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

DAVID: Feathers allowed flight to appear, but not in your short-sighted view.

Of course they did, but that doesn’t mean they served no purpose before flight! The whole evolutionary process depends on “new uses of existing components”. Do you believe that the legs of prewhales were only designed so that they could change into flippers?

QUOTE: "Scientists have helped to construct a detailed timeline for bacterial evolution, suggesting some bacteria used oxygen long before evolving the ability to produce it through photosynthesis."

DAVID: Another example of preparatory developments in preparation for a future use, in this case oxygen. Like feathers on dinosaurs, dhw will invent a just-so Darwinian tale to explain it.

The just-so story is entirely yours. Future uses depend on future conditions. If your God exists, the only preparation for the future would appear to be an autonomous mechanism that enables cells (including bacteria) to cope with or exploit whatever conditions may exist in the future. Do you really believe that dinosaur feathers evolved or were specially designed just to hang around doing nothing until there was flight, and that early bacteria used oxygen for no purpose?

New theory of natural complexification

dhw: […] 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. […]

DAVID: Much simpler with God as designer.

dhw: 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"!

DAVID: Yes, we don't have any proofs.

Not a bad reason for remaining agnostic.