Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, August 06, 2020, 12:26 (1568 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Please tell us how God “allowing” beneficial mutations, which arise from mistakes he is not responsible for, can mean he designed all the mutations that led to speciation – especially in view of your statement that “a mutational error favoured by natural selection or by God may have arranged for our human evolution”.

DAVID: My theory about errors is totally based on our knowledge of living biochemistry to then judge what God did. We know molecular errors can occur. We know there are backup processes. This tells us God recognized the problem in the form of life He created. It means He could not stop each molecular error in an active biological system. And I don't think natural selection had any role to play.

Living biochemistry tells us that the current biological system is riddled with “errors”, because so many things can go wrong. We know that SOME of these errors can sometimes be corrected by the cells themselves, and sometimes by human intervention. You have told us that God has played no part in the process since sapiens became established. In the course of evolution, you tell us that your God had no control over the mistakes, but let some through and destroyed the others. So how do you know about the ones he destroyed? And how could he have destroyed them if he could not stop or control them? And I don’t really know how you can tell the difference between God allowing a mutational error to arrange for our human evolution and natural selection doing the same. Nor could you when you wrote that “a mutational error favoured by natural selection or by God may have arranged for our human evolution”. And finally, if God “allowed” beneficial mutations, he did not design them. Therefore evolution has proceeded through the survival of random but beneficial mutations and not through design. That makes you a Darwinist.
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DAVID: I am the one willing to show that God is not all-powerful and all knowing and he can’t stop molecular errors in a system he created.

DAVID: God was always under full control as I've described. You want a weak humanized God who allows mistakes to make advances. Not my view of a highly purposeful God in any way.

dhw: The bolded quote above does not describe a God who is in full control, and it is you who have explicitly stated that your God allows (beneficial) mistakes to make advances! My theistic version of the “mistakes” proposes a God who does exactly what he wants to do, and the history of life reflects the fulfilment of his purpose.

DAVID: Yes, God lacks control of those molecules when they can not respond properly to directions.

So how does that mean he was always in control, and how does that mean I want a weak humanized God who allows mistakes to make advances, which is NOT what I want but is explicitly what you want?

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dhw: I cannot see the logic behind your insistence that every single organism in every single econiche in life’s history was “part of the goal of creating humans”.

DAVID: Same silly distortion. I don 't try to explain His choice of method.

dhw: There is no distortion in my repetition of your own words or in the fact that I can’t see the logic behind your theory. You tried earlier to explain the choice of method you impose on your God by telling us that He had to design all the organisms in all the econiches to feed humans who weren’t there yet. I don’t blame you for not trying again.

DAVID: The simple result is we are here and I use history to tell us how God did it. You can't deny that.

History tells us we are here. It does not tell us that your God directly designed every life form and econiche – a theory you yourself have now demolished by claiming that the beneficial mutations were NOT designed but merely “allowed” – and it does not tell us that he did so “as part of the goal of creating humans”, with 3.X billion years’ worth of food designed to feed humans who did not yet exist.

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DAVID:An insect cannot develop a toxin by trial and error and survive. Designed by God.

dhw: Maybe its ancestors survived by other means.

DAVID: Tell me the other means, can you?

dhw: How about a sticky, non-toxic web that simply traps the spider’s prey until he/she eats it?

DAVID: You are forgetting the spider species who invented their toxins. Sam e problem I raise.

You are forgetting that you asked me for an alternative means of survival to that of toxic webs. I have given you one.