Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Friday, March 05, 2021, 12:10 (1150 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your red herring. Adler used our evolution for His exposition about human exceptionality.

dhw: The red herring is that we are talking about the illogicalities in your theory of evolution, and all you want to talk about is Adler’s agreement with you that humans are exceptional, which I have also accepted over and over again.

DAVID: Your illogicalities represent your confusion about my beliefs as to how God ran evolution as a part of His creations.

Your stated belief is that your God’s only purpose was to design H. sapiens, and so he designed millions of life forms, econiches, strategies, lifestyles and natural wonders, 99% of which had no connection with humans. That is the illogicality I challenge. What is my “confusion” and what are my "illogicalities"?

Your gut has a big brain

QUOTE: Research (mostly in the laboratory, but some in humans) suggests that emotions can affect the gut microbiota, and that, conversely, certain gut microbes can be mind-altering," Dan Gordon wrote in U Magazine.

"'We have been cohabiting with these bacteria for hundreds of thousands of years, and we have developed a relationship we haven’t even started to understand.”

dhw: Fascinating, and yet further evidence of the intelligent cell communities which cooperate in forming all organisms including ourselves.

DAVID: They just follow a series of God given instructions.

So every single interchange between the billions of bacteria inside the almost infinite number of individual humans (not to mention other life forms) was preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, or possibly dabbled at various intervals in history. Curiouser and curiouser.

Multiverses

QUOTE: What atheists have done is invoke a concept of multiverse that is conceptually unintelligible and scientifically unobservable. This unintelligible unobservable probability landscape is convenient for atheists, who can merely assert that it accounts for fine-tuning without providing even a shred of evidence or logic. The “multiverse” theory frees atheists from real science, which is the only condition in which atheism can survive."

DAVID: We've been over all of this before. The conjecture is unproveable and therefore worthless.

dhw: I agree completely, but this is the AgnosticWeb, and we specialize in balanced arguments. What theists have done is invoke a concept of a being that is conceptually unintelligible and scientifically unobservable. This unintelligible and unobservable being is convenient for theists, who can merely assert that it accounts for fine tuning without providing a shred of evidence or logic. The “God” theory frees theists from real science, which is the only condition in which theism can survive.

DAVID: Only a mind can create fine tuning, which is why atheists have to invent unproveable multiverses. And agnostics follow their tune, dhw admits to be hung up on the need for design.

No they don't follow the atheists' tune. Agnostics can’t commit themselves to the tunes of the unscientific, unprovable, unintelligible, unobservable theories of atheists and theists alike. You are right, though: the need for design counterbalances the incredibility of a designer who didn’t have to be designed. One way or another, I am left acknowledging that there are mysteries which cannot be solved.