Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, July 07, 2020, 12:40 (1351 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Molecular errors in living biology are just that, much as you try to contrive if differently.

dhw: Of course errors are errors. But you insist that your God designed “living biology”, and you tie yourself in intellectual knots, telling us that he deliberately designed the “errors” to weaken and kill old people, but it was impossible for him to build the system without accidental “errors” that would weaken or kill all of us, and so he tried to provide safeguards, but some of those didn’t work.

DAVID: A great description of my viewpoint. No biological living system can be designed perfectly. That is the truth. I accept God, warts and all, as you view Him.

The question is what sort of God you accept. At one moment he is all-powerful, all-knowing and in total control. The next he’s faffing around creating a system full of errors which he can’t control, trying to provide safeguards, and even then failing to do so. We’re not talking about a minor detail here. This is the whole of “living biology”, i.e. life itself, of which according to you one particular species was his one and only purpose for creating the universe! And yet when I propose that he actually created the system he WANTED to create – because he did not want to create billions and billions of perfect life forms that would go on multiplying and diversifying but would never die – I am accused of “humanizing” him and making him act without a purpose.

DAVID: You know God knew of His problems with biological processes. He built-in the safeguards He could.

dhw: Apparently you regard this as less human and more purposeful than the hypothesis I present of a God who knows exactly what he wants and produces it.

DAVID: I've said before your bolded phrase is exactly my thought. But your God experiments and enjoys spectacle. That is a humanized God.

If he knows what he wants and produces it, and what he produces is full of errors, then he must have wanted a product full of errors! And why do you think a God who deliberately creates the “errors” is more humanized than a God who does what he can (and sometimes fails) to make up for the errors in the system he has designed?

Under “biological complexity”: Dr. Daley found that each resection enzyme is tailored to deal with a specific type of complex break, which explains why a diverse toolkit of resection enzymes has evolved over millennia." (DAVID’s bold)

DAVID: It seems God recognized errors would occur and provided all the necessary tools for perfect reproduction.

As before, you have him designing the system from scratch, blundering (because you say he did not create the errors deliberately), trying to provide safeguards, and sometimes failing. (Is reproduction always “perfect”?). As with the immune system, we clearly have a mechanism which enables cells to solve problems and, over time, to build up a library of their solutions. Maybe your God provided this autonomous mechanism which sometimes does and sometimes doesn’t solve the problems and which I call “cellular intelligence”.

DAVID: We use the same logical methods of thought. The logic behind His choices is unknown to us.

dhw: How can a “logical method of thought” be the same as ours if we can’t understand the logic?

DAVID: The 'logic' resides in God's reasons for his choices. We can't know that.
Of course it does. You have guessed at his choice (bolded below), and can’t find any logical reasons for it. So once more: how do you know that his logical method of thought is the same as ours?

dhw: What is illogical in your theory – the bit which you always try to dodge and which you tell us Adler does not deal with – is the claim that an all-powerful God has only one purpose, to create H. sapiens, but spends 3.X billion years specially designing millions of now extinct non-human life forms before then specially designing all our ancestors before finally specially designing us.

DAVID: The bold was God's choice. You object while admitting God, if He exists, ran evolution.

No, the bold is your interpretation of his choice! How often do you want me to repeat that although each of your three guessed premises is possible in itself, the combination is illogical. You admit that my alternatives are logical, complain that they “humanize”God, and try to forget your own agreement that he probably has patterns of thought similar to ours - which is a perfectly logical proposal since you believe that our consciousness is part of his consciousness.


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