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

by dhw, Monday, April 07, 2025, 08:53 (7 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

dhw: 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: No simple answer. They generally follow God's rules of cellular activity but have freedom of action. There is no problem unless they end up in the wrong place, such as a human body.
And:
DAVID: The problem is when bacteria get into the wrong place. You ignore all the good they do.

I don’t know what rules you are referring to. I have suggested and you have agreed that your God gave humans and bacteria freedom of will and action. This would also explain the dog-eat-dog history of living forms in general. There is no wrong or right place. Billions of bacteria are in our bodies to help us (= good for us) , but others enter our bodies to kill us (= bad for us). All of their actions are directed towards their own survival, and good and evil are simply a human concept based on what is good for us. And so God’s only role was to design the mechanisms that enable us all to do our own fighting. But having accepted all of this, you reject it by reverting to your former escape route (more good than evil), your by-product theory, whereby your God was so incompetent that he unintentionally created the evil he didn’t want to create, or your insistence that although bacteria have freedom of will and action, they do not have freedom of will and action because they only obey your God’s instructions, although he would never have instructed them to kill us humans! Total confusion.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I do not contend that at all. I say as Raup does, 99.9% went extinct to produce 0.1% surviving.

“The 99% extinct produced us” is a quotation from one of your posts, and you keep repeating it. Please stop blaming Raup. YOU have agreed that we and our food are descended from 0.1% of survivors, and not the other 99% which produced no descendants. However, this obvious truth is the reason why you ridicule your God for his inefficiency, because you insist that he had to design and cull 99 out of 100 species in order to create the only species he wanted to create. You absolutely refuse to consider the possibility that he created what he wanted to create, as illustrated by the three alternative theistic explanations I have offered you.

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.

dhw: 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?

No answer.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Early bacteria used oxygen in their metabolism, fully purposeful.

Thank you.

DAVID: He developed feathers in anticipation of flight.

I'll go along with the article which you thought supported you but doesn't. Repurposing - not crystal-ball gazing,

DAVID: You don't see God as an all-controlling designer of environment and living forms as I do.

Firstly, if your God gave living forms freedom of will and action, he does not control them - hence the dog-eat-dog history resulting from this gift. Secondly, yet again,if your God’s sole purpose was us plus food (which he could have created “de novo”), why would he have deliberately designed and culled 99 out of 100 of his living forms irrelevant to his purpose? You make your God ridiculously inefficient because you start out with a form of God you wish to believe in, and so the rest must follow. You cannot bear to believe that some of your wishes and self-contradictory conclusions might be wrong.