More Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Monday, April 15, 2024, 21:47 (14 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Monday, April 15, 2024, 21:55

Giant viruses

DAVID: The history of evolution had extinction requirements. You continue to torture Raup's book. All of evolution required a 99.9% lost.

dhw: I have no idea what Raup believes, and I wish you would tackle my arguments directly instead of hiding behind him. If God exists, he would have determined what evolution required – he would not have been bound by some requirement he hadn’t created for himself. Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God require himself to design 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his one and only purpose?

Please find some definition of evolution to see that it requires loss of species. God chose to evolve us is obvious if one believes in God.

dhw: But you think such suffering is justified because your God wants to give us a challenge. Please tell us why you think he wants to challenge us.

DAVID: If you wish everyone sat peacefully around doing nothing just eating and sleeping, would you want a life like that? I'll take the challenges!

dhw: I have no idea why you think an interesting life would be impossible without rape, murder and millions of deaths from the diseases for which you blame your God. You keep telling us under “Theodicy” to ignore the evil and focus on all the good your God has created! Now we should forget all the good (the joys of love, family, friendship, art, sport, travel, etc.), and you thank God for creating or allowing evil to prevent you from getting bored.

DAVID: I never ignored the 'good'. Your fallacy.

dhw: You have just done so here and on the Plantinga thread. Without evil, you think “Eden” would be boring (“sitting around...just eating and sleeping”).

Is living just eating and sleeping? No mental activity? We should just be bugs.

Cell complexity: formation of the centriole

DAVID: Design means a designer did it.

dhw: Yes, That is a rational conclusion. But if a complex life requires a designing mind, the designing mind must be so complex that it too would require a designer: you need blind faith to believe that an unknown, immaterial, superpowerful form of consciousness can simply exist without a source. That is why I remain on my picket fence.

DAVID: I'll stick with there must be a first cause.

dhw: I agree. The basic choice lies between an eternal, conscious, sourceless mind and an eternal, infinite mass of ever changing matter and energy forming endless combinations which eventually produce the first forms of life. One of these must be the truth, but I can’t choose between them.

Hint: organic molecules just don't join up. It requires lots of energy or magical enzymes which appear with just the right fits!!

The wild Milky Way center

QUOTES: “A huge black hole with high-speed stars in all sorts of wild orbits…”

“A few stars win the collision lottery…"

DAVID: by design the Earth is safely far away, two-thirds of the way out on the second spiral arm. It seems the larger the galaxy, the more turbulent is its center.

dhw: Bearing in mind that ours is only one of billions of galaxies in a universe that contains trillions of stars and quintillions of black holes, I can’t help feeling that the lottery image is more appropriate than that of design.In fact, 86 percent of the bacteria causing infections after spine surgery were genetically matched to bacteria a patient carried before surgery. That number is remarkably close to estimates from earlier studies using older genetic techniques focused on Staphylococcus aureus.

Patterns like designed-for-life, our very unusual spiral galaxy, etc. refute that thought.

" Nearly 60 percent of infections were also resistant to the preventive antibiotic administered during surgery, the antiseptic used to clean the skin before incision or both.

It turns out the source of this antibiotic resistance was also not acquired in the hospital but from microbes the patient had already been living with unknowingly. They likely acquired these antibiotic-resistant microbes through prior antibiotic exposure, consumer products or routine community contact.

Mictobiomes and post-surgical infections

DAVID: the infections occur, not because the bacteria are 'bad', but they are freely built to survive on any food available. Not God's fault. Bacteria necessarily live as freely-acting organisms.

dhw: And yet a couple of weeks ago, you wrote: “What is fair is to blame God for natural disasters: earthquakes, terrible storms, and bugs causing diseases, non-human parts of his creation.” Why are you blaming him, if it’s not for the fact that he knowingly gave bacteria the freedom to infect us as well as help us? And why then would you not blame him if he knowingly gave us the freedom to do evil? Or do you mean that your omnipotent and omniscient God was powerless and too ignorant to prevent the evil caused by his inventions?

God had to accept tradeoffs to produce life. He created the best form of life He could. We need good skin microbiomes. A slicing scalpel makes no choices, just an instrument of delivery.