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

by dhw, Wednesday, June 11, 2025, 08:30 (1 day, 14 hours, 43 min. ago) @ David Turell

Humanization

DAVID: You describe His 'interest' in free-for-all in a way that strongly suggests entertainment…

dhw: You said yourself that he must enjoy creating or he would not do it, and interest in his own creations does not imply entertainment. Would you describe a parent’s interest in their child’s activities as “entertainment”? But who knows? Your God might be a sadist! You've already made him look like an inefficient fool.

Not answered.

DAVID: His need to experiment shows a lack of directed purpose.

dhw: It is not a “need” if his purpose is to create new things, get new ideas, make new discoveries. But he may also experiment in order to find the best solution to a problem – e.g. if his purpose is to create a being that will recognize and worship him, he may try to create a combination of cells that will give one of his creatures the necessary level of consciousness.

DAVID: The now bolded shows clearly your God's weak humanness. My Biblical God has omniscience, knowing all His goals.

Your God knows only one goal – to design us plus food – and his goal for doing so may be his very human desire for recognition and worship. Nowhere in the Bible will you find a God who inefficiently designs and culls 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to his only goal, or a God who deliberately designs murderous viruses because they do more good than harm or – alternatively – has no control over the murderous viruses he inadvertently created. And besides, who says the biblical God is the real God? The God of the OT demands worship, murders those who don’t worship him, and orders the Jews to do the same. Is that your God?

DAVID: […]. What appears to be experimentation in God's evolution is actually the development of many interacting ecosystems as resources for humans.

dhw: And so for 3.X billion years he designs species and ecosystems, 99.9% of which have no connection with humans and have to be destroyed if he is to fulfil his sole purpose. Please stop dodging the absurd illogicality of your theory.

DAVID: Your same complaint: God took 3.X years. So what, God is timeless.

The complaint is not about the time but about your absurd theory bolded above, with which you ridicule your God for his messy inefficiency.

Bacterial antibiotic resistance

DAVID: Teams of cells rely upon each other.

dhw: Please explain how a team can absorb, share and process new information, pass it on to another team, and cooperate in the taking and implementation of individual decisions relating to individual new conditions, and yet be unaware of everything it is doing.

DAVID: All biochemical reactions proceed automatically with precise molecular activity.

Is this another of your obfuscations? The question is what directs the biochemical reactions, and in your next reply you agree that plants and animals have an intelligent awareness!

Under “biological controls in plants and animals”, I wrote: “It’s clear from some of the articles you have posted that this extends to other plants, with examples of symbiosis and strategies that could only come about through some form of intelligent awareness.”

DAVID: An intelligent awareness designed by God.

dhw: Thank you. You now accept that as well as bacteria, plants and animals (= cell communities) are possessed of “intelligent awareness”. I have always allowed for your God as its designer. Why do you exclude the opossum?

DAVID: His instinctual reaction requires a conceptual beginning from a capable brain.

The beginning is a first-hand observation, and of course the conclusion drawn from that observation requires a capable brain. But according to you, the opossum sees the wolf walk away, but God has to descend from heaven and explain to him that he might imitate the dead opossum one day, and then maybe the wolf will walk away. Daft!

Under Milky Way not hitting Andromeda

DAVID: Our brain should convince you a designer God exists.

dhw: As you know perfectly well, I accept the rationality of the design argument. But this solution to the mystery of the brain, and indeed all life, creates an even greater mystery – how could the superintelligent mind of an immaterial designer have come from nothing and simply existed forever?

DAVID: Always existed is my position. Why is there anything?

dhw: Why would there always have been a superintelligent mind that had no source?

DAVID: Back to a necessary first cause.

Correct: either a sourceless conscious mind, or a sourceless mixture of matter and energy.

Importance of astrocytes

You posted a similar article about 10 days ago. If anyone is interested, my own detailed response can be found under “More Miscellany 2” under “More astrocyte studies”.

Importance of ELAV

QUOTE: Given that proteins similar to ELAV are conserved from flies to humans, these findings strongly suggest a similar mechanism governs circRNA production also in the human brain.

As with astrocytes, here we have further evidence of how much the brains of fruit flies and other organisms have in common with human brains, as well as the intricate communications that take place between the different parts of the brain as they process and use information in determining their own and our behaviour.