Should I take it that you reject the notion that there was no death (logically or temporally) before the fall, and maintain that death is essential to the created natural order, and is not due to sin?
No. Because it is beside the point.
Just because it is at times consistent with Godâs nature to do something (because of particular circumstances), does not mean that it is consistent with Godâs nature to always do it (no matter what the circumstances).
The fact that it was (apparently) consistent with Godâs nature to kill nearly everybody in a flood, does not mean that it is consistent with Godâs nature to kill nearly everybody with a flood at every opportunity.
You have neither done a good job of demonstrating that God mimics humanity (at times) nor have you demonstrated (at all, as far as I can see) that it is in Godâs nature to always do so.
No. You did not âexplainâ how these observations âgives us reason to infer that it is probably personal like us.â You merely baldly asserted that they did.
Yes I did:
I.e. these observations are unrelated to the conclusion, in the same way as the following:
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Roses are red.
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Violets are blue.
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Therefore I love peanut and jelly sandwiches.
Balderdash:
It was you who explicitly brought up âthe animal kingdomâ in response to an objection that explicitly included theodicy.
Yes, and as I pointed out that âlarge screed of blather [is] utterly and egregiously irrelevant to the question of whether the theology involved is âNOT [related to Godâs] relationship with nature and the animal kingdom.ââ
For a more detailed dissection of your purported âhypothesisâ, I direct you to @Mercerâs comment.
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This topic is getting a bit heated and without much ground gained. The options are to either close it down and have everyone walk away or to cool down a bit and try to refocus. Iâll try the 2nd first before pulling the plug.
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@Meerkat_SK5 , you tend to say a lot but itâs kind of all over the place and youâre jumping to conclusions before demonstrating the validity of your premises. Letâs slow it down and work a bit at a time rather than an all-encompassing argument.
Letâs start with youâre hypothesis:
So letâs get things more well defined. Do you have:
- a mechanism by which Godâs âchoiceâ would be manifested biochemically?
- a method to distinguish between âdirectedâ and âundirectedâ mutation?
- is mutation the only mechanism God would use to direct evolutionary outcomes? If so, why?
- evidence, outside of the data used to distinguish between the two models, that Godâs direction would be limited to âimprovement of survival or to fit ecological nichesâ?
I havenât read every post but I donât think Iâve seen described a test that would actually distinguish between the âevolutionary biologyâ mechanism and the âevolutionary biology + directionâ mechanism. A major hurdle is that by definition Godâs choices or desires are not completely knowable. Godâs decision making would not be a variable we could control. So I think we need to see a test of the form âif God directed evolution, then X will happen, and if God did not direct evolution then Y will happenâ that actually distinguished between the two.
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- improvement of what, exactly? Survival, etc., of what, exactly?
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He has stated something to that effect with regards to design flaws. He says if God directed our evolution, then we shouldnât find design flaws or sinister designs. I have repeatedly pointed that GULOP refutes his hypothesis because it is a serious disadvantage to those who have it and donât get enough vitamin C in their diet. Mice have functional GULO, so when it is knocked out in the lab, the mice suffer scurvy-like disease and die afterwards. There is just no significant advantage to losing GULO activity. When he replies, he entirely ignores the serious challenge GULOP poses to his hypothesis and starts yapping something about the design of bronchial tubes as if it had anything to do with GULOP.
He is here to do apologetics, not have a proper scientific discussion. Just watch his response to you later on or better still pull that plug and save us some brain power.
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Right, hence my âthat actually distinguishâ because I donât know how you can actually determine what a design flaw or sinister design is. A general obstacle I see with any attempt at scientific hypotheses involving God (such as Intelligent Design) is that I donât see how you get around the idea that you would have to know Godâs intentions, purposes, and design. By definition we have incomplete knowledge and so you would never really be able to say something was demonstrably a flaw, or if it was just an intention we didnât yet know (i.e. it could be a âfeatureâ we havenât discovered yet or an optimization for a future environment).
We spot the âdesignedâ watch because we have previous experience seeing watches as a whole, and seeing all pieces, and seeing it run as intended so we know what the parts do, etc. knowing beforehand that it was human designed. We could play with it and test this part or that. I donât think any theist would say we can do similar things with God.
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That pretty much defies any definition of God.
A broken GULO gene with no significant benefit (and some serious disadvantages) linked to itâs loss of activity properly qualifies as a design flaw under his hypothesis.
Others have tried to make him see reason with this, but he wonât. Surprisingly, he employs this same reasoning when trying to deflect some critiques like what he is doing with John Harshman and extinctions. Its hopeless.
Well, we have one theist named Meerkat, running in circles, trying to squeeze God into a test tube.
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Hence:
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I agree the bad design argument is difficult because of our limited understanding of biological structures and our limited understanding of matter.
The common thread with the design argument is that what we observe through inductive reasoning can be attributed to a mind. What @Meerkat_SK5 is doing is trying to be more specific which is a greater challenge. All that being said the counter arguments here donât seem very constructive in helping him refine his thinking.
Inductive reasoning is fine ⌠but itâs only as good as âdataâ youâre inferring from. For instance, a car motor or CPU fan are practically useless for determining anything about a biological molecular motor. Too many things are dissimilar. So even if you can establish car motors are designed by minds and CPU fans are designed by minds ⌠thatâs meaningless for determining if flagella or FTPase are designed by minds. Does that make sense?
How could we be more constructive in helping refine his thinking? As a Christian Iâm perfectly open to the idea that God designed things in biology, but Iâm not seeing things here that would help me argue that we can âdetectâ it.
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Why is it meaningless?
This is a good question. I am struggling to see how you connect our Judaeo Christian God without mixing in theology. The other issue is that he appears to have eliminated special creation as a possible cause. I am not sure how he has narrowed his hypothesis to guided evolution given he believes God was involved in the process. With a Devine creator involved the âhowâ new animals originate is hard to pin down. This is similar to your critique of the âbad designâ argument.
Not so for GULOP. Its inactivity slowly and painfully saps away the life of any organism that depends on the product of its functional versionâs gene product, if that organism cannot get that product from external sources. Only a psychopath deity mean would install such a feature in itâs creations and Meerkatâs claims his designer is not evil: so GULOP falsifies his version of guided evolution, as well as what he thinks of the character of his designer.
And has fumbled spectacularly.
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Yes, makes perfect sense. The âtoo many things are dissimilarâ explains it well. The attributes of the constituents of biological molecular machines are simply not analogous to relatively inert macroscopic objects like CPU fans and car engines. Physics at the molecular level does not conform to our everyday intuitions. The magnitude of influence of things like surface tension, just to pick an example, completely changes the picture. I know of no analogous attribute in any part of a CPU fan or car engine.
Things donât meld together, jiggle around through multiple weak associations, arenât conformationally flexible, or soluble, or anything like that. Not even macroscopic magnets are appropriately analogous because theyâre not suspended in solutions with very little influence of gravity.
At the macroscopic level you canât just throw stuff together randomly and then itâll sort of self-assemble into a coherent structure by having attractive and repusive surface properties, they donât float around and bounce into each other and so on and so forth.
Iâve tried to get these points across to ID proponents and their machine/computer analogies innumerable times but it doesnât stick. They go right back to imagining what happen if you randomly toss large chunks of metal and plastic into a pile on the floor.
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Not so, actually. He only requires that the design flaw or sinister design should benefit some entity, perhaps a different species or the biota as a whole. And if we canât find such a benefit we should instead imagine that such a benefit might exist. So, untestable.
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For example, you know humans draw faces and have done so in a wide variety of ways. That means if you walked into an abandoned house or cathedral and saw face paintings, you would immediately conclude humans did it. However, look at this cloud face below captured on camera and tell me how your knowledge about human-drawn faces helps you understand its origins in the clouds in the absence of human intervention.
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For an inductive âargument from analogyâ the power or persuasiveness comes from the shared properties or âconnectednessâ of the premises. If you have two things that are too dissimilar, you lose the ability to have a confident conclusion.
If I argue:
- Star Wars is a movie, and itâs a science fiction space fantasy about good and evil, a galactic empire and âthe Forceâ
- Groundhog Day is a movie, and itâs a fantasy comedy about a weatherman who wakes up every day repeating February 2nd.
- Therefore, all movies are fantasies
We see a clear problem, weâre cherry picking.
If I argue:
- Star Wars is a movie, and itâs a science fiction space fantasy about good and evil, a galactic empire and âthe Forceâ
- Newtonâs 2nd Law states that the force is equal to the mass times the acceleration
- Therefore, Newtonâs 2nd Law is a fantasy
The problem here is that âthe forceâ in one context is completely different from âthe forceâ in the other, making the argument absurd. I have worked on car motors and I have helped design molecular motors, I can tell you that they are very very different things. ID as a whole has not done nearly enough to show how these things go beyond superficial similarity. We use âmotorâ for things like flagella, and FTPase, and heliotropism because they convert non-mechanical energy into mechanical energy ⌠thatâs it. I have not seen any argument as to why fundamentally all âconversion of non-mechanical energy into mechanical energyâ requires a mind. All Iâve seen is âlook, they rotate!â
Just to clarify: Is this a question for me? And connect God to what? biology? history of life?
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This is your opinion and reasonable people can disagree as Vitamin C has many external sources. Animals require outside sources of nutrition to survive. Is @Meerkat_SK5 eliminating deleterious mutations as possible?
What are you trying to accomplish with this statement?
This is not the design argument. You have created a straw man IMO as the design argument is not based on motors. Motors are simply used in the discussion.
Beheâs argument is about a purposeful arrangement of parts similar to Paleyâs original argument.