Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 19, 2020, 15:25 (1224 days ago) @ dhw

Fine tuning

DAVID: Again a weak God who is running things second-hand. Depends upon one's view of God.

dhw: Nothing weak about a God who knows what he wants and gets it. If he chose NOT to run humans, why is it out of the question that he might have chosen NOT to run evolution (apart, perhaps, from occasional dabbles)? An unpredictable free-for-all would be so much more interesting for him than a dull Garden of Eden.

Now you propose a God who is so bored He needs an exciting free-for-all, and then you complain about my accusation about humanizing!!!

Egnor’s latest

DAVID: I specifically said He designed evolution.

dhw: You certainly did, and created a strong and logical case. Fortunately, you never said anything remotely like the theory I have just summarized above. Very wise of you.

Again, God's choice to evolve from bacteria is obvious to theists.

Chimps ‘r’ not us

dhw: Chimps and other animals all have to use their brains in order to process information, take decisions and give material expression to those decisions. Even bacteria have to do the same, though they haven’t got brains. Do they all have souls?

DAVID: In the Jewish religion they have animal souls.

dhw: That would make sense for dualists. I wonder where the boundary lies. Do ants have souls, then? What is your own view about animal souls?

I believe they exist, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to know if it reaches insects in Jewish thought.

Strange quark stars may exist
DAVID: We don't understand why quarks are quarks, and the designer isn't talking, but with our brains we can figure out lots of the mysteries. And the moral is survival is not needed to have a brain like this. This clearly means survivability is not an issue which causes any sort of any evolutionary advance. It is an unproven Darwinistic proposal. 'Survival of the fittest' is a tautology, and doesn't tell us how speciation happens.

dhw: How you can twist the subject of strange stars to yet another silly moan about Darwin is beyond me. In any case, “survival of the fittest” is not meant to tell us what mechanism enables organisms to turn into new species. Darwin’s theory about that was random mutations, with the beneficial ones surviving. We both reject that. The urge to survive, or to improve chances of survival, is what spurs the changes that lead to speciation. Even you will have to admit that that is the obvious reason for known adaptations. And it is perfectly possible that our brains began to change as a result of our ancestors developing or having to develop new means of surviving/improving their chances of survival. Nothing to do with strange quark stars.

As I see it, animals and plants definitely sense danger, but it is said we are the only species that recognizes eventual death. I don't see us wildly changing to avoid death. Again you are clinging to pure Darwinism that there is a real drive for survival. I accept it as a reasonable but unproven theory, and doubt strongly it is a factor in speciation.