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

by dhw, Thursday, August 13, 2020, 10:45 (1561 days ago) @ David Turell

David’s new error theory is so confused and confusing that I will try to unravel it, using his own words. First of all, what are these errors? “These biological accidents are chance events, accidents not a designers fault.” When do they occur? Always: “DNA as a molecule can always make mistakes and will during evolution and now in a different time period.” The latter comment refers to pre-sapiens evolution as one period, when God was active, and the present, in which God is inactive and we are “in charge to handle molecular mistakes.”

If, for the sake of this discussion, we accept the existence of God, we must now tackle two basic questions: 1) how much control does God have over these accidents, and 2) what role do they play in David’s theory of evolution?
Re control: “You do not understand the issue that high speed reactions can have errors God can’t control.”
“No form of any God could control molecular mistakes in free-floating molecules which are supposed to respond properly to specific stimuli.”

David divides the errors into two categories: those that cause disease and death, and those which ”During evolution… can change the course of evolution.” As regards the latter, despite the blanket rejection of the possibility of divine control (which apparently means that although he designed the system, the errors are not his fault), “if it is a bad mutation, as most are, He deletes it. If it happens to be beneficial for the advancing evolutionary code He wants, he keeps it.” I’ll return to this later. As regards the former: “ Dinosaur cancer is just an example of errors while living during all of evolution. God does not try or bother to correct those.” However, this is directly contradicted by the following exchange:

dhw: How could he have directly dabbled or provided the first cells with a 3.8-billion-year programme to correct errors he could not correct?

DAVID: I don't know when He recognized the problem during evolution, but I would guess quite early as we know of cell-splitting problems, which means bacteria could certainly have reproductive problems. Note the blue comment: He put in backups, so He was correcting as much as He could.

Clearly, then, he had limited control over the errors from early on in evolution, and the backups – which were equally prone to error – prove that he did “bother”. We are therefore left with a God who mysteriously only had limited control over some accidents (disease and death) and yet had total control over others (affecting the course of evolution). We must remember that ALL of these errors take place in the same system which God himself designed. David himself confirms the lack of control: “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.” (Elsewhere David has repeatedly emphasized that his God is all-powerful and is always in total control.)

As regards evolution, until now David’s theory has been that his God directly designed every species, econiche, lifestyle, natural wonder etc, in the history of life, and all of these were “part of the goal of evolving humans”. The direct design entailed either a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for each development, or a direct dabble. However, if a random mutation could “change the course of evolution”, then quite clearly it was not part of the original 3.8-billion-year-old programme. This even extends to humans: “A mutational error favoured by natural selection or by God may have arranged for our human evolution”. Without preprogramming, we are left with divine dabbling, but this entailed accepting or rejecting the change of direction - not designing it. Since these random mutations were ALWAYS happening, clearly evolution was constantly switching directions, and all God could do was allow it to happen or stop it from happening. Goodbye, then, to targeted evolution by design.

This view of God, no longer all-powerful and all-knowing, and no longer with a fixed programme that directly designs every life form etc. in history, opens the door to every theory that I have proposed: if his goal was humans, he may have experimented to get what he wanted (let’s see if these random mutations will get us there), or the random mutations may have given him the idea later on in the ever changing history. Or maybe he WANTED the randomness and deliberately designed a system that would provide unpredictable mutations because he WANTED the higgledy-piggledy and ever changing bush. The only theory that is not supported by all the above is that in which an all-powerful God had total control over evolution, had one specific life form – H. sapiens (plus food supply) – as his goal, but directly designed millions of other life forms that had nothing to do with H. sapiens.