Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Sunday, June 13, 2021, 10:51 (1049 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You simply black out the rest of your bolded theory in your constant game of dodge, dodge, dodge.

DAVID: Define dodging in a debate. I strongly feel I am answering honestly about my beliefs and theories.

The most blatant of examples is when someone is asked a question and avoids answering it. You see it all the time in political interviews. In your case, the question is: why would a purposeful, all-powerful God whose sole purpose is to design H. sapiens (plus lunch), have specially designed millions of life forms, lunches, lifestyles, strategies, natural wonders etc., 99% of which had no connection with H. sapiens? You generally dodge the question by picking on individual sections of your theory, which in themselves make perfect sense. Humans are unique, humans descended from bacteria, all life forms need food. And when the worst comes to the worst, you respond by attacking my alternatives. All perfectly legitimate, but none of them provide an answer to the bolded question, and the fact is you can’t provide an explanation for what in fact is inexplicable, as you yourself occasionally admit until once more you insist that the theory is logical. It isn’t, and so we begin the same round of question from me and dodges from you.

Clear evidence of common descent
dhw: Once more: do you believe that every life form (apart from the first) is descended from a previous life form, or every life form was created from scratch (de novo)?

DAVID: Many life forms are modifications of previous species: birds came from a branch of dinosaurs, and their design did not require a complete rewrite. I pose God as the rewriting engineer which gives us descent with modification. Frankly the only full de novo I know is the Cambrian explosion.

Thank you. Of course common descent entails modification – otherwise there would be no speciation! As regards the Cambrian, you do not “know” that species were designed “de novo”. You assume they were because of the absence of fossils, and because some scientists express disbelief that new species could evolve by chance during such a short period of time. Time is relative. The “explosion” began approx. 540 million years ago. That is one helluva long time by any standards, and the fact that ANY fossils have survived is itself amazing. It lasted for up to 25 million years, but even if the productive period was “only”, say, 10 million years, that is also one helluva long time. As for chance, I would argue that any innovation leading to the complexities of new organs and organisms suggests design rather than chance, BUT…design is not confined to your God. Hence the theory of cellular intelligence (possibly provided by your God). And the intelligent response of organisms to changing conditions through millions and millions of years would provide a rational explanation for the Cambrian Explosion, as it does for the rest of evolution. What remains unexplained is the origin of the mechanisms and the intelligence that drives them.

vagus nerve interoception
dhw: Clearly the brains of rats also sense bodily functions through the vagus nerve. Neither you nor Tallon-Baudry have a clue how we come to be conscious of our brain’s ability to sense bodily functions!

DAVID: Our God-given brain.

Fine, but nobody knows how the brain generates consciousness of the brain. In any case, that is the tenet of materialism, and I thought you were a dualist.

Ingenious research tricks
DAVID: Cell intelligence (dhw theory) can't create this. Only a highly-advanced designing mind can.

dhw: I’m not proposing that the cell’s intelligence created the way in which it functions! The research (vividly) reveals the mechanisms. It can’t reveal the intelligence that controls the mechanisms, any more than it can reveal your God’s 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for all its transformations.

DAVID: My same purpose: as we reveal the complexity of life's processes only a superior designing mind must exist.

But we should separate Chapters One and Two of life’s processes. Your God may have designed the original mechanisms and processes involved in Chapter One (Darwin himself allows for that), which would include the cellular intelligence championed by certain distinguished scientists, but that does not mean God must have designed Chapter Two, which is the speciation that constitutes evolution.