Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Monday, February 15, 2021, 12:33 (1159 days ago) @ David Turell

Spiders lasso

DAVID: The purpose is production of humans, as previously stated. My view of God is that He is too purposeful to create something for His own self-interest. Do you think He gets bored?

dhw: I have asked why he created life including humans, and you keep chickening out of answering. I don’t know why you regard the creation of something interesting as not being purposeful.

DAVID: God does not need anything to interest Him.

I didn’t know you were that pally with your God. When did he tell you this?

DAVID: He does not tell us why He created life, and religions are full of guesswork.

Ah, he only tells you the reasons he did NOT have for creating life. And yes, religions are full of guesswork. How does that come to mean that God is interested in us (your belief) but didn’t create life because he wanted to create something that would interest him?

Fin to limb genes

DAVID: You forget or ignore our evolution is one continuing process from simple to complex.

dhw: That does not mean it is one continuing process from bacteria to H. sapiens! It is one continuing process which according to you has encompassed the direct design of millions of extinct life forms that had no connection with humans, though you insist that the only purpose of all those extinct life forms was to enable your God to design humans.

DAVID: I think God could have designed humans without the bush, but what we would we eat? Therefore He evolved a huge bush.

So he evolved a huge bush, 99% of which no longer exists and had no connection with us, so that we could eat the present bush. See your own quotes under “Theodicy….”

EGNOR ON FREE WILL

DAVID: I needed your repetition to properly answer point for point. The 'beyond our control' is totally fallacious. I have full right to chose among the influences in my past and discard them. Raised liberal I am now a very conservative libertarian. You are correct, free will involves what you make yourself free from, and environment, chance events, previous easily discarded upbringing never should influence an individual decision in that moment of thought. Freedom from most of the past in very possible.

dhw: I don’t know why you left out the last sentence of my answer: ”The argument in defence of the concept is that all the influences combine to make the unique person that is me, and nobody else takes my decisions.” My point was that Egnor made no mention of this all-important aspect of the subject.

DAVID: My answer above is in full support of that approach you cited. I'm with Egnor.

Egnor never mentioned cause and effect. That was my complaint!

Highest speed claw snapping

DAVID: God is the designer of life and evolution. History is a clear picture of how He did it by design.

dhw: You have only offered us two forms of design, so please tell us: do you think he designed claw-snapping 3.8 billion years ago, or stepped in to perform an operation? And do you think claw-snapping was part of his goal to evolve humans and their food supply?

DAVID:I've told you over and over I don't know which mechanism God used for each and every design, but I have shown in recent entries the strong evidence of pre-planning in antecedent DNAs.

You have told us over and over again that your God either preprogrammed the first cells with all the advances, or stepped in to dabble. At different times you have favoured one over the other. On the thread “more genomic evidence”, you have at last mentioned a “mechanism for advance”, which ties in neatly with the theory of cellular intelligence. None of the articles on DNA provide “strong evidence” of pre-planning, unless you mean evidence for a mechanism which enabled later life forms to create the changes that led to speciation.

The biochemistry of cells

QUOTE: One of the unique things with this study is that we have been able to study individual cells instead of simply entire cell populations. This has allowed us to really be able to see how the cells transition from their individual behaviour to coordinating with their neighbours.

A neat summary of the process whereby individual cells cooperate to form communities – and we can extend this to how cell communities cooperate with other cell communities as they go on to create the ever increasing variety of structures which make up the history of life on Earth.