Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 19, 2021, 15:33 (1044 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Silly. You describe how evolution happens and then complain about the mechanism. His method is evolving bacteria to human in stages.

dhw: My complaint is your constant attempts to dodge the fact that according to you his only purpose was to design humans and their lunch, and his “method” entailed individually designing millions of life forms, econiches, lifestyles, natural wonders and lunches that had no connection with humans.

Again you describe evolution and claim God should not have done it that way, but He did. My total argument is from that position. No wonder you cannot accept belief in God with your line of reasoning. God, in charge of all creation, chose to evolve everything that ever existed with a goal of producing humans at the end.

A.N. Whitehead
DAVID: I've viewed Whitehead as not accepting God but accepting evolution as a sort of God.

WHITEHEAD: "It is as true to say that the World is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the World.”

dhw: He was a believer, and this quote is closely akin to your panentheism. But he rejected your version of a transcendent, all-knowing God. What you call wishy-washy and namby-pamby if an agnostic dares to challenge your own fixed view.

DAVID: He believed with his view, I with mine, both equal.

dhw: So when I propose a God who learns as he goes along (a continuous process of what Whitehead calls “becoming” – hence the term process theology), my theory is equal to yours, and is not to be dismissed as weak, namby-pamby, wishy-washy….

I don't accept Whitehead either, but Whitehead doesn't describe an active God as you do.

Even our White matter is different
QUOTE: A complete portrait of the structural basis of cognition and emotion cannot neglect the white matter because it interacts so intimately with its gray matter counterpart."

DAVID: The main point is the enormous connectivity between the brain parts which allows to to have the thinking capacity we have. Had to be designed.

dhw: The heading of this thread is misleading. Our fellow animals also have white matter, but we just have much more of it.

DAVID: That is a difference, isn't it?

dhw: If you have a million dollars and I have a hundred, does that make your dollars different from mine?

But I've got a villa on the Riviera and you are living on the dole.

Magic embryology
DAVID: It has to be a highly controlled, orchestrated, programmed series of events. Therefore highly designed and never by chance mutations.

dhw: Agreed. And isn’t it amazing how often these researchers find themselves talking in terms of cells conversing and sending messages! All these processes must have had a beginning, and if cells are intelligent, as some prominent scientists believe - and a good friend of mine acknowledges that the odds are 50/50 – they could have developed the original design which, of course, would then have been passed on.

DAVID: 50/50 only because we are on the outside looking in. This is where interpretation is employed.

dhw: If the odds are 50/50 and you reject one of the 50s, I would suggest that is where prejudice is employed.

If my study leads to certain conclusions about the 50/50 (which are honest odds, nothing more and not in any way underlying fact), my studied conclusions are prejudiced and yours are?