More Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Sunday, April 21, 2024, 09:27 (13 days ago) @ David Turell

Giant viruses

DAVID: Please find some definition of evolution to see that it requires loss of species.

dhw: Please find one for me. Changing conditions have resulted in 99.9% extinction and in new species emerging. That is history. It doesn’t mean that an all-powerful God was forced to design species irrelevant to his purpose!

DAVID: Your usual fallacy. A purposeful God does not produce irrelevance.

You have inadvertently cottoned on to the reason why your theory is so illogical. You have no idea why your omnipotent and omniscient God would have produced the irrelevant 99.9%, but instead of considering the possibility that he might have had a different purpose, or that he might not have designed every species individually, you insist that only your version of his “inefficient” design of irrelevant species is correct.

Centriole (now first cause)

dhw: I keep telling you I accept the logic of design! But even you admit that belief in the being described above requires irrational faith.

DAVID: Faith is not irrational.

Off we go again with your contradictions.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote: “It is YOUR reasoning I am criticizing, not your God’s. Nobody knows God’s reasoning…” You replied:

DAVID: Welcome to faith which does not need rationality.

If you can’t find a reason to justify your faith, and your faith does not need rationality, how can you claim that your “faith is not irrational”?

The wild Milky Way center

QUOTES: “A huge black hole with high-speed stars in all sorts of wild orbits…”

“A few stars win the collision lottery…"

dhw: Bearing in mind that ours is only one of billions of galaxies in a universe that contains trillions of stars and quintillions of black holes, I can’t help feeling that the lottery image is more appropriate than that of design.

DAVID: I think it is all by reasoned design.

But you can’t think of any reason for it. Your opinion is based on irrational faith.

Microbiomes and post-surgical infections

DAVID: the infections occur, not because the bacteria are 'bad', but they are freely built to survive on any food available. Not God's fault. Bacteria necessarily live as freely-acting organisms.

dhw: And yet a couple of weeks ago, you wrote: “What is fair is to blame God for natural disasters: earthquakes, terrible storms, and bugs causing diseases, non-human parts of his creation.” Why are you blaming him, if it’s not for the fact that he knowingly gave bacteria the freedom to infect us as well as help us? And why then would you not blame him if he knowingly gave us the freedom to do evil? Or do you mean that your omnipotent and omniscient God was powerless and too ignorant to prevent the evil caused by his inventions?

DAVID: God had to accept tradeoffs to produce life. He created the best form of life He could. We need good skin microbiomes. A slicing scalpel makes no choices, just an instrument of delivery.

dhw: “Had to”…? “best he could…”? Today he’s lost his omnipotence and omniscience. A few days ago he was to blame. Yesterday all of these evils were necessary to provide a challenge and to prevent boredom. Which of your versions are you going to offer us tomorrow?

DAVID: Apparently your desired perfection cannot exist.

“My” desired perfection? It’s YOU who claim he’s perfect, omniscient, omnipotent etc. but had to do this and that – thereby knowingly creating evil – and was powerless to prevent it, though he did his best!

Storms are needed

DAVID: The pigmy human mind does not see God's reasons for dangerous storms, until research explains God's reasons. Thus, lots of thoedistic complaints await answers.

dhw: Like Dawkins, you wait for science to confirm what you wish to believe. Meanwhile, you have 50 million flu victims from 2018 and about 11 million holocaust victims haunting you as you announce that God allowed them to die in order to relieve the boredom, or their deaths don’t matter because God did so much good, or they shouldn’t object, because God must have had a good moral reason though you can’t think of one.

DAVID: It is God's obligation to have morally sufficient reasons.

Since when was it God’s obligation to have the attributes you wish him to have? Do think that relief of boredom is a morally sufficient reason for allowing rape, murder and the Holocaust? Please don’t answer “dayenu”.