More Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Friday, April 12, 2024, 12:13 (17 days ago) @ David Turell

Origin of humans

DAVID: Your dive into God's brain is your refusal to understand theologian's views. Your logic is not God's logic!

dhw: […] I don’t “refuse” to understand your wacky theological theories but, like yourself, can’t find any logical reason for supporting them. And I can’t join you in faithfully accepting your own wishful thinking.

DAVID: I'm sorry you can't jump in and see the logic.

The only logic you have offered us is the design theory. You admit that you can’t find any logic in your theory of evolution, and that your often self-contradictory views of your God’s nature are based on your wishes, not on “logic”.

Evolution and purpose: teleonomy.

QUOTES:[the authors have explored] “in depth the different ways in which living systems have themselves shaped the course of evolution.”

As this collection compellingly shows, and as bacterial geneticist James Shapiro emphasizes, “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable."

DAVID: The reviewer is looking for purpose as God evolved us.

dhw: And he has no right to do so, since the book is manifestly not about God and some divine purpose but about the purposeful mechanisms that have driven evolution.

DAVID: And he questions where did that purpose come from? And you object to that?

I do not think a reviewer should criticize a book for not dealing with the subject he/she would like it to deal with. Why should a scientific study of how evolution works have to discuss theology?

DAVID: Same subject, different questions with possible answers you seem to avoid.

How evolution works is not the same subject as how life might have originated. During your medical career, when you were studying how diseases developed, and what was needed to cure them, I hope you didn’t spend half the time explaining to your patients that God had a purpose in creating the bugs and had given you your great brain in the hope that you would find an antidote. The purpose of science is not always to wed itself to philosophy and theology.

Giant viruses

DAVID: from my view of purpose acting in evolution, all forms of life that are here play a necessary role.

dhw: Necessary for what? All forms of life, extinct and extant, have played and play a role in the history of life. (Nothing to do with your theory of evolution, in which 99.9% of forms had no link with the present but for no conceivable reason were specially designed and culled by your God.)

DAVID: Same weird total distortion of the evolutionary process. The 99.9% must be linked to the now living or the now living would not be here.

Off you go again. You have agreed that it is the 0.1% that are linked to the now living. How many more times?
(dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived?
DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.)

dhw: […] please tell us, for example, what you think is the necessary role of the influenza virus.

DAVID: Just like Covid. God-given brains are challenged and protect us.

Millions die or are impaired for life, and that is necessary because God gave us brains to protect ourselves with. I find your logic incomprehensible.

Cell complexity: formation of the centriole

DAVID: I cannot reproduce any portion of this study which is filled with picture illustrations of all the steps and parts. If possible open the website and skim through. The complexity of the design will be startling.

I have skimmed. It’s way beyond my comprehension, but that is a point in itself: I’m amazed by the fact that humans are able to analyse the different parts of such a tiny organism, and the amazement is massively multiplied when we think of the design itself. This is where faith in chance becomes as irrational as faith in an unknown, unknowable, immaterial, eternal, sourceless, omnipotent, omniscient, all-good form of consciousness.