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

by David Turell , Monday, April 07, 2025, 18:03 (6 days ago) @ dhw

Theodicy

DAVID: The problem is when bacteria get into the wrong place. You ignore all the good they do.

dhw: 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.

Bacteria making penicillin or insulin pharmaceutically are placed right.

dhw: 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

A distortion: Free will is good for humans, but evil humans produce evil. The by-product is not God's fault.

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.

dhw: “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.

The 99.9% extinct produced the 0.1% surviving!

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.

the legs became flippers. What is your point?

DAVID: He developed feathers in anticipation of flight.

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

It depends own your underlying mindset, no designer possible. Accept a designer and the logic is obvious.

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

dhw: 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.

Note I said control of design of forms and environment. Their freedom of action has no role.

dhw: 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?

I don't know His reasoning.