Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 17, 2020, 15:29 (1226 days ago) @ dhw

Fine tuning

DAVID: Remember, I view evolution as ended, and with free will humans are certainly having a free-for-all.

dhw: Even if it were true that evolution has ended, that does not invalidate the theory that your God wanted a free-for-all! And the fact that humans are having a free-for-all is a clear indication that your God is perfectly capable of wanting a free-for-all, so there is absolutely no reason to insist that he couldn’t have wanted evolution itself to be a free-for all.

Apples and oysters. Designing evolution is serious work to produce proper functioning new forms. Humans fussing is at a totally insignificant level.

Egnor’s latest

dhw: I'm not surprised. Why in heaven's name would he own up to using such a roundabout way of fulfilling his one and only purpose?

DAVID: Ask Him. I don't know, but not knowing bothers you, not me.

dhw: We cannot “know” anything. We can only theorize. What “bothers” me is a theory which even its proposer can’t make sense of.

DAVID: You want 'sense'. It is of no matter to me.

dhw: This makes a mockery of all discussion. In any case, you have written two brilliant books, the basis of which is that life’s complexities only make “sense” if we accept the argument for design, i.e. for a designer, i.e. for God. You only want “sense” when you can find it, but thank you for admitting once more that your theory makes no sense to you.

Don't you realize I wrote the two books not knowing God's reasons for his choices of methods of creation???

Arctic squirrels
QUOTE: "Arctic ground squirrels can survive harsh winters with below-freezing temps by holing up for some eight months without eating. These hibernators “live at the most extreme edge of existence, just barely hovering over death, and we don’t fully understand how this works…”

DAVID: I would like a Darwinist tell me how this extreme change was evolved. Not step by step by chance. It was designed.

dhw: Maybe Arctic winters were not always as harsh as they are now, and millions of years ago, as winters gradually became harsher, the intelligent cells that run all adaptations introduced and refined these remarkable ways of countering the harshness... I find this vastly more convincing than the theory of random mutations, and also of God preprogramming the very first cells 3.8 billion years ago with squirrelly methods of countering extreme cold, or stepping in to operate on a batch of shivering squirrels as part of his goal of evolving humans.

It is true palm trees were at the North Pole, but the hibernation is so extreme I still feel design is the cause.

Kangaroos

DAVID: this is just domestication. Newborn horses want nothing to do with us, and we have to teach them we are OK.

dhw: 100% agreed. This one made me laugh. Animals are not wild if they have been trained by humans! I suggest the researchers devise a test for a pride of lions in the African jungle, and stand close by to see what will happen. We know that wild animals help their own species, and there are lots of symbiotic relationships in which different species also help one another (e.g. birds picking alligators’ teeth); feral children brought up by animals would be another example, though very rare.

Roos are not lions by any stretch. I met many in Australia.

Chimps ‘r’ not us
QUOTE: "This is exciting, because we now have a way to identify genomic regions that might have contributed to the evolution of our cognitive abilities!"

dhw: Perhaps we should note in passing that the researchers take it for granted that our “cognitive abilities” depend on our material selves.

Ourselves are immaterial but must use the available brain to form abstract thoughts.