Treating congenital defects with gene editing (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 16, 2020, 11:12 (1619 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Thank goodness, our advanced human brain can find solutions for biological problems. It is the answer I have for theodicy. God gave us a brain that can solve problems that arise.

dhw: Disregarding the problems that our fellow organisms and our not-so-clever ancestors have had to face over the last 3.8 billion years, why do you think he wanted to set us problems in the first place?

DAVID: Opening up to lots of guesswork. Viruses were with us from close to the beginning of life, and there is important evidence they actually helped in the process of evolution. That doesn't explain the bad ones, but that means their evolution was not tightly controlled by God; we don't know the reason. Didn't worry about it, didn't care, or let it go on purposely. Take your pick.

dhw: Nobody “knows” your God’s reasons for anything! But it appears from this that God might NOT always be in tight control of evolution. And if you accept that as a POSSIBILITY, you can hardly reject it as a possible explanation for the vast variety of life forms resulting from his not WISHING to tightly control evolution, i.e. that he let evolution ”go on purposely”.

DAVID: Or His tight control allowed the mistakes to happen because He anticipated our giant brain would solve the problems that appeared!

As usual, you seem to think life began with humans. And I really don’t see how “allowing mistakes to happen” ties in with tight control – but I’m not going to quarrel with your proposal that that he might not have tightly controlled evolution and might have “let it go on purposely”. That is one of the various explanations I have offered for the higgledy-piggledy history of evolution.

.dhw: […] Or if he made mistakes, you are committing what you seem to regard as almost blasphemous, i.e. that your God is humanly fallible. As an “answer for theodicy”, it works quite nicely, though – evil is the result of God not being in control, or being humanly fallible.

DAVID: […] All we know is that there are biological errors in any living system operating at such high speed, and controls designed into it cannot stop everyone of them. That leaves us with: God did the best He could, and any better is impossible considering the necessary complexity of living organisms. I'll accept that.

Well, if you can accept that God did the best he could but he couldn’t avoid making mistakes (how extraordinarily human of him), I don’t see why you can’t accept the possibility that life’s bush was the product of his experiments, or H. sapiens came late on in his thinking. Why is that more “human” than making mistakes?