Biological complexity: misfolded protein problems (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, September 09, 2017, 10:39 (2633 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID's comment: (Under "Cell division DNA controls") With enough advances in research into cell division and reproduction we might be able tp solve the congenital defects like Down's syndrome, an issue dhw raised today. Again this research demonstrates how complex is our biology has to be. Not by chance.

dhw: I agree that it’s not by chance: the complexity has been built up by intelligent combinations of individual units. But the issue I raised is that your God’s designs are riddled with mistakes, and if – as you keep insisting – he is all-powerful and in full control, the logical inference has to be that these are not “mistakes” but weaknesses deliberately built into the system. So here’s a theistic alternative: your God planned a system that would make mistakes, and he gave organisms the means to work out solutions. Some did, some didn’t. Some do, some don’t.

DAVID: Perfectly designed systems do make mistakes at times, do break down. This is our human experience, and I think that fits what we see in the genome replication at very high speed; occasional errors. By your way of thinking God should not have made the universe so dangerous, but He didn't.

I think you mean He did. I’m afraid my definition of perfection would not include a propensity for making mistakes. For someone who objects to any anthropomorphization of his God, you surprise me by arguing that since we humans make mistakes, so does God. But you have missed my point anyway, which is that your God might have deliberately devised a system that made mistakes. If we apply that approach to humans, we might perhaps agree that if every human behaved “perfectly”, and if there were no mistakes of any kind to be corrected, life might become boringly predictable.