Back to David's theory of evolution: God's errors (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, July 30, 2020, 11:15 (1575 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: And so he is a puppet master who can’t control his puppets.

DAVID: So wrong. Puppets have direct controls. Molecules have instructions to follow, but mistakenly may not. Facts of life you refuse to accept.

So presumably your God gave up on dabbling. Of course I accept that things go wrong! But if molecules are able to disobey your once supposedly all-powerful God’s instructions, your God has either lost or has never had control over them. Like a puppet master who can’t control his puppets. A logical conclusion you refuse to accept.

DAVID: Mutational errors may or may not be God, but it went forward with His permission.

dhw: So now you think he’s capable of preventing good mutational errors but is powerless to prevent bad ones.

DAVID: Total misrepresentation. DNA as a free molecule can make a mutation by error or gamma rays. God chooses to leave it if worthwhile or eliminate them, exactly what I said.

If God chooses to leave a good mutation, he clearly has the power to eliminate it. However, you have forgotten that you told us he does NOT have the power to eliminate bad mutations (errors). Put your two statements together, and you have exactly what I said (now bolded). Please stop editing your own comments.

DAVID: You still do not understand molecular errors. God may allow beneficial ones.

dhw: You still do not understand that a God who is capable of preventing beneficial errors but is incapable of preventing deleterious ones (a) has NOT deliberately created the beneficial ones, which makes nonsense of your argument that he is always in total control of evolution, and (b) is pathetically weak, especially in the light of the next comment, from your second post:

DAVID: Autoimmune diseases are mistakes of the genetic immune system. God has given us a brain that can solve many of the problems created.

dhw: He can’t solve some of the problems, but we can! Your God gets weaker every day.

DAVID: Still entirely without comprehension. Repeated: "DNA as a free molecule can make a mutation by error or gamma rays. God chooses to leave it if worthwhile or eliminate them, exactly what I said." Our immune system is what we currently have. It makes mistakes. God is not in the business of fixing them now; it is up to us and our big brain.

According to you he was incapable of solving the problems in the past. I don’t know what sort of business you think he is involved in now, but if you are implying that he could solve them now if he wanted to, then we would have a learning God very different from the all-knowing one you started out with, though fitting in nicely with one who experiments or gets new ideas as he goes along. Meanwhile, you are still stuck with your proposal that we are better at fixing his errors than he is.

dhw: Why won’t you consider the possibility that he did not WANT to control the molecules, and that he WANTED to give them free rein to make both beneficial and deleterious changes to themselves?

DAVID: Again, an idea from an imagined weak humanized God. Why would He allow 'deleterious changes' when He purposely put in backup systems? I see a God with serious purpose. You don't.

Please stop pretending that your God has serious purpose and then refusing to say what that serious purpose is. According to you he did not “allow” deleterious changes. He could not prevent them. And according to you, even his backup systems didn’t always work. That makes him considerably weaker than the God I am proposing, who WANTED the system we have. The so-called backup systems would have evolved over time as free running organisms tried to combat those free running forces whose survival threatened their own. The conflict between good and bad at all levels would then be integral to your God’s purpose, as would death. Why do you refuse to even consider the possibility that your God is not the weak and helpless designer of an imperfect system whose errors he can’t correct, but who deliberately designed the system we have? We needn’t even discuss possible purposes for doing so, since you “prefer to look at his creator side, and not consider that his human side has any role in his decisions for creation.”