Re: George Coyne and Richard Dawkins

On 5/23/24 5:16 AM, Richmond wrote:

John Harshman <john.harshman@gmail.com> writes:
 

On 5/22/24 8:59 AM, Richmond wrote:

John Harshman <john.harshman@gmail.com> writes:
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On 5/22/24 1:59 AM, Richmond wrote:

*Hemidactylus* <ecphoric@allspamis.invalid> writes:
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Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> wrote:

Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> writes:
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On Tue, 21 May 2024 14:58:19 +0100, Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> wrote:
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Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> writes:
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On Tue, 21 May 2024 10:54:16 +0100, Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> wrote:
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Martin Harran <martinharran@gmail.com> writes:
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On Mon, 20 May 2024 17:16:16 +0100, Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> wrote:
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In this interview, at the point I link to:
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https://youtu.be/68ejfHahFK4?t=254
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Father Coyne offers Neodarwinian Evolution as an
explanation for, among other things, the origin of the
universe. And Professor Dawkins agrees with him. How does
evolution of any kind have anything to do with the origin
of the universe?  surely it would need something to evolve
from?

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I got the impression that he was using "evolution" in a
wider sense than just *biological* evolution, that life
itself "evolved" from chemical reactions.

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I suppose you could interpret "origin of the universe" as
"origin of the content of the universe" and then say that it
evolved from pure energy. But I am not sure if that is
evolution strictly, or just changing from one thing to
another. And I am not sure if energy is different from
content, or if universe is different from content of the
universe. In summary, I am not sure.

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When talking about a subject in what is essentially a
metaphysical way. I think we shouldn't get too hung up on the
precise meaning of specific words, it's the ideas behind the
words that matter.
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A fascinating interview that I had not seen before, thanks
for the link. Whilst I was aware of George Coyne, I never
really explored his ideas before and I was fascinated by how
much what he was saying echoed my own beliefs and ideas -
there was nothing he said that I would argue with and I
thought he handled Dawkins extremely well.

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The TV series from which it was excluded was quite
entertaining. I think in that series Dawkins was struggling
to keep the lid on his temper at times, although that could
just be his natural expression.

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I wasn't aware of that series. Any idea why this episode was
excluded?

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At the beginning of the video Dawkins explains that it was left
out as there was too much overlap with an interview with the
Archbishop of Canterbury.

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OK, I forgot that your link started ~4 mins in. I'll be
interested to hunt down the Archbishop of Canterbury episode,
but I'd expect it to have a lot of overlap with George Coyne. I
think that a lot of USians make the mistake of regarding the
likes of Ken Ham as a representative of mainstream Christianity
when he isn't - at least not outside the USA!

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Coyne sounds rather confused to me. He doesn't seem to know what
God is. He says God is not an engineer, and then he says God
created the universe, that he is a prime mover, and gave us
brains, and then he says God is superflous and doesn't explain
things.
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Coyne doesn’t think we are apes, so I disagree with him there.  He

acknowledges that we evolved from apes so it is just how the
categories are defined. I think he means we are not identical to
what he thinks of as an ape.
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But at around 56:31 when Dawkins asks him about ensoulment (a
bugbear of mine) Coyne says he doesn’t believe in the soul. Coyne
explicitly says around 56:43 that he doesn’t “believe this idea of
at some time in the evolutionary process God put a soul…”  >> He
got himself into that pickle by saying God is not an intervening

engineer. The alternative is that every living thing has a

soul.

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There are other alternatives. For example, the soul could be an
emergent property of the body, particularly of the brain. If he gave
us brains (mentioned above), souls could have come along with that,
and perhaps even gradually. Maybe chimps have
near-but-not-quite-souls.  >> So at what point in the transition
from ape to human did the soul >> appear, and why? Did Neandertals
have souls, or other kinds of human?  >> (And what's a soul
anyway?).

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You should ask someone who thinks souls exist.

 You can't say whether it exists or not, unless you define 'soul'. You
will also have to define 'exists' too though.
 My computer has a soul. I back up the soul to a removable disk. If the
computer dies I can buy a new one, restore the soul from the backup, and
my computer has lived on after its death.
 (I don't have a backup really, backups are a thought experiment for me).
 

If you are really convinced your computer has a soul, saving it to an external disk isn't the best way to insure its immortality.  Upload it to the cloud (many available services, such as iDrive are available, often free if the soul is less a a few Gbyte).  That way we'll never be rid of it, even if we wanted to be.