New Miscellany 1 & 2: humanizing, intell., Milkdromeda etc. (General)

by dhw, Sunday, June 08, 2025, 11:57 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The attributes of your God needing a free-for-all for entertainment and his need to experiment are the humanizing aspects of your God, not like my God's possibilities.

“Entertainment” is your pejorative word for “enjoyment” (the term you used in your own humanization), and it is you who keep harping on about “need”. Your own proposals concerning his possible desire for recognition and worship (see my repeated response below) are considerably more “needy” than any of mine. You might enjoy painting a beautiful picture to decorate your living-room. Does that constitute an entertainment? Does it make you needy? Why shouldn’t your God enjoy creating? Do you really think he would spend eternity doing nothing? Now please re-read my response of yesterday:

dhw: Your attack on my alternative theistic theories provides no defence of your own. Your “humanizing” objection has long been discredited by your agreement that your God may well have thought patterns and emotions like ours, and you yourself offer enjoyment, interest, desire for recognition and worship, possible love as examples. And why not? For creations to reflect aspects of their creator does not make their creator a human being – a silly exaggeration. Since this “humanization” is your only objection, discredited by yourself, you clearly can’t find fault with any of my alternatives.

dhw: Why do you think he gave humans free will? Please answer.

DAVID: The conceptualization capacity of our brain needs free will to work at full capacity.

dhw: Back to your vague “concepts”. And why do you think your God wanted humans to have maximum “conceptualization capacity”? Please answer.

DAVID: Our brain is my evidence.

I asked you WHY you think he wanted humans to have this special gift. Please answer.

Animal intelligence: the opossum

You insist that your God’s one and only purpose was to design us and our food, so please tell us why you think your God would have found it necessary to design the stupid opossum and give it special lessons on feigning death.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance

dhw: Why would your God give single cells autonomous intelligence but take it away when single cells form communities?

DAVID: Teamwork!!! Survival on your own requires that in singles, but not in teams of cells.

Difficult to follow. Why should individuals lose their intelligence when they form a team?

Atheism

DAVID: […] But you clearly dislike a God who works in designs for future use.

dhw: Even if that were true, it still wouldn’t make me an atheist!. […] What I do dislike, however, is any theory that makes no sense and is full of contradictions, e.g. by postulating a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient designer whose design is messy, cumbersome and inefficient. […]

DAVID: I am using the accepted conceptual form of the Biblical God. And you?

Whereabouts in the Bible does it tell us that humans evolved from a common apelike ancestor, and that God is a messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer who designed and culled 99.9 out of 100 species he never wanted, and that despite his omnipotence and omniscience he could not control the nasty bacteria and viruses he had inadvertently created? Besides all that, do you use the conceptual form of the vengeful, murderous, egotistical God of the Old Testament? (I don’t.)

Milky Way not hitting Andromeda

QUOTES: […] it was simple and straightforward to conclude that in about four billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda would collide and merge.

"Only now, with new data from Hubble and Gaia about galaxies from all across the Local Group, it looks like that picture is too simple and naive, and may not be right at all.”

"Our entire Local Group eventually should turn into a single galaxy, Milkdromeda, but the timescale for this fate is still largely unknown. It may still be ~4 billion years from now; it’s more likely that it will be ~8 billion years from now; it’s plausible that it will be ~10+ billion years from now, and maybe even tens of billions of years into the future. However, it’s extremely unlikely that either of these galaxies will be ejected from the Local Group, and thus an eventual merger really is inevitable. The question of when this will occur, however, just got a whole lot more interesting."

The combination of these quotes is hilarious. As usual, we have sensational new discoveries, which actually teach us that the conventional view of a merger is absolutely correct (though initially “it may not be right at all”), and the conventional timing of 4 billion years may be right, but it might be wrong. That’s progress for you.

DAVID: […] dhw will comment why did God make such a big universe if His only interest is us on Earth? My answer is God knows what He is doing and for some reason unknown to us the universe's size is required.

Your own bewilderment should alert you to the possibility that his sole purpose can’t have been to create one planet sufficiently fine-tuned to sustain us and our food. Another possibility is that there is no God, and the first cause is eternal matter and energy constantly combining into different forms that eventually produce the combinations necessary for life. I find both first-cause theories equally difficult to believe.