Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Saturday, January 02, 2021, 09:22 (1204 days ago) @ David Turell

Fine tuning

dhw: As usual, you focus on one part of your theory (God designing every stage of human evolution), omitting the rest of it: if his sole purpose was to design every stage of human evolution, why did he directly design millions of life forms, strategies etc. that had no connection with humans? You have no idea. Please stop backpedalling.

DAVID: No backpedal. My staunch position: God chose to evolve all stages by designing each one.

All stages of what? Your staunch position is that his sole purpose was to design H. sapiens and food supply, but first of all he designed millions of life forms and food supplies, 99% of which had no connection with H. sapiens, and you have no idea why he did so. But still you continue to present sections of your theory in isolation as if they somehow justified your staunch faith in the inexplicable and illogical COMBINATION of your different beliefs.

DAVID: And I'll stick to obviously God uses logic we we do. As for His own emotions and other thought patterns, they are unknown to us and we both can guess that they have some similarity to ours. It still does not tell either of us why He chose to create history the way He did.

dhw: No it doesn’t. That is why I offer different theories concerning what might have been his purpose and method (if he exists). You can see the logic behind every single one. The only theory on offer which leaves you with no idea why he would have chosen a particular method to achieve a particular purpose is yours.

DAVID: The personality of God is where we always differ. Yours is humanized.

Firstly, that does not alter the fact that your own theory presents you with a problem of logic, and you have no idea how to solve it. Secondly, it is no more “humanizing” to propose that God experiments, or has new ideas as he goes along, or wanted a free-for-all, than it is to claim that he had one fixed purpose right from the start (H. sapiens), knew how to get it, and wanted total control of everything. Thirdly, there is no reason whatsoever to dismiss your own firmly stated belief that God probably has thought patterns and emotions similar to ours.

Every Life Is on Fire

DAVID: There is more to life than just matter. The metaphysical and the source of energy to be absorbed are equally important. Just matter is one portion of the considerations. Teh materialists view is half baked.

dhw: Of course there is more to life than matter, and more ways to approach it than through science. Materialists don’t have to deny the existence, importance or teaching qualities of ethics, morals, culture, art, music, religion, philosophy etc! How does this prove that we have free will, or that consciousness is not an emergent product of the brain, as you claim in your materialist role?

DAVID: My non-materialist approach requires that any emergence requires an extra spark of energy from God.

Your explicit, materialist statement that “consciousness is an emergent product of the living brain” does not exclude the possibility that your God designed the living cell to produce the consciousness which emerges from the vast community of cells that make up all brains and bodies. See the Egnor thread.

Cambrian Explosion

QUOTE: “We hence extend the roots of the Cambrian Explosion itself into the Ediacaran, where total group lophotrochozoans such as Namacalathus show a combination of features that became typical of both later lophophorates and representatives of the entoproctan-molluscan-annelidan branch."

DAVID: What the article shows is that very late Edicarans and very simple early Cambrians are related. It doesn't solve the major gap posed by the full blown Cambrians of a little later time. This is a finding that is fully expected, at the boundary of the two periods. There certainly isn't an abrupt dividing line in evolution.

This finding and your final sentence greatly reduce the strength of the argument that the Cambrian did create a gap or dividing line, and did produce totally new life forms without antecedents. What you call “a little later time” covers a period of 55 million years. Peanuts in geological terms, but it “only” took at most four million years for the earliest hominids to evolve into H. sapiens, so I reckon a vast assortment of changes could have taken place in 55 million years, especially if we replace the theory of random mutations with the theory of (possibly God-given) cellular intelligence as the driving force of all the changes.