Question for Atheists ( hoping for a interesting debate)

@UBotMate ditto

@UBotMate @JimboSaturn ok. where did the information for ‘defense’ come from?

@Heavenlywarrior What do you mean? Plants experience stress events, they retain the epigenetic memory of those events and they adapt accordingly.

@UBotMate you say plants experience stress, and develop thorns as a defense these are all traits of awareness and consciousness.

Are plants aware or conscious?

@Heavenlywarrior to some extent yes

@Heavenlywarrior Evolution.

@Heavenlywarrior Plants have sensory mechanisms which allow them to be 'aware' of the environment around them such that they can respond to it. Stress events for plants are not referring to stress in human terms of feeling. Computers can have stress events too. They are, put simply, events which disrupt normal function or growth.

@Ferise1 Are you implying the plant or nature is selecting from possible strategies?

@Heavenlywarrior huh?😂😂😂

@Ferise1 seems like we are saying that Nature in itself is not blind and unguided

@Heavenlywarrior The opposite is being said.

@JimboSaturn If genes 'do certain things' and perform specific functions, who or what assigned those functions? Doesn’t saying a gene 'functions' in a particular way imply there’s a correct purpose — and if there’s a correct purpose, doesn’t that require intentional design or direction?

@Heavenlywarrior Not at all. Natural selection is the mechanism for chosing genes that give an advantage. You should really read and honestly try to understand evolution without your religious bias. Everyone is giving you very clear answers but you dont really seem to want to read and understand them.

@Heavenlywarrior Organisms big and small develop characteristics in response to threats to its existence or other stressors.

But there is nothing planned or organized behind it.

The characteristics that facilitates survival persists and those that don't die off for the most part but some also persists and in cases like sickle cell becomes a detriment later when it no longer was useful.

There is nothing elegant about evolution

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow Isn’t “threat” a relational concept — it only exists if something values its own existence? How can a molecule or cell, with no self-awareness, evaluate danger or prefer survival?

@Heavenlywarrior Not at all. Pain receptors communicate a threat or danger to the body but the ability to feel pain is in no way related to consciousness or self awareness.

A person can be largely brain dead and still respond to pain stimuli for example.

@Heavenlywarrior They don't. The rose that has thorns lives more and reproduces more becauses the thorns protect it. Ones that don't have thorns do not have as many offspring, over millions of years only the roses with thorns are left. There is no thought or design just a natural process.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow If threat is merely a mechanistic signal, then why does anything “care” about it? Why does evolution favor responses to threat unless something — at some level — is being protected?

@JimboSaturn What guides this process of selection toward such finely tuned, targeted, and repeated functional adaptations? Why does a chaotic universe keep arriving at coherent, functional forms — not just once, but billions of times across species?”

@Heavenlywarrior because pain is real

@Ferise1 real to whom?

@Heavenlywarrior IT doesn't care. You are assigning feelings to strictly bio mechanical processes. Evolution doesn't favor anything.

There is a response to input and the resulting response either works or it doesn't and if it doesn't that mutation dies out. It is not like something is picking and choosing anything.


You mix baking soda and vinegar together you get a reaction. It is not because the baking soda is upset with you.

@Heavenlywarrior So your argument is pain doesn't exist unless something is capable of an entirely emotional response? That is ridiculous.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow No…definitely not my arguement but I want to see something…..

If all biological processes are just reactions — then where does the knowledge of those reactions arise? Where is this conversation — right now — happening in your model of baking soda and vinegar?

@Heavenlywarrior So give me a minute. Are you now arguing that baking soda is self aware?

Your argument seems to be that there has to be an emotional based impulse for bio mechanical reactions to happen.