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

by dhw, Tuesday, August 18, 2020, 10:48 (1556 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: During evolution most DNA mistakes are errors and are removed by dabbling. The few good mutations are obviously allowed and can be viewed either omissions in God's pre-planning, or simply fitting, in a general sense, God's planning to evolve humans in a slightly altered way.

We agreed that there are two categories of errors: one that affects evolution, and one that causes diseases and death (see later). “Omissions in God’s pre-planning” already weakens your original theory that your all-powerful, all-knowing God always knew what he wanted and how he would get it. But we now have random mutations changing the course of evolution, luckily fitting a not all-powerful, not all-knowing God’s plan to evolve humans, and for millions and millions of years (the errors are ongoing) helping to produce life forms etc. that have nothing whatsoever to do with your God’s direct design of H. sapiens and his food supply.

dhw: Until now you have constantly reiterated that all species were directly designed, and nothing was left to chance, and God knew precisely what he was doing from the very beginning. You reject any possibility of his having to experiment (i.e. not knowing everything from the start) but now you have him actually relying on chance to offer him unforeseen ways to help him achieve what you think was his goal.

DAVID: There is no reliance on chance. Read the above comment. No experimentation. Your bias is showing.

Experimentation is simply ONE theory to link the vast pre-human bush with your insistence that your God’s one and only goal was to design H. sapiens. I have proposed several other explanations, and remain open-minded about them all. My point was that experimentation would be far less damaging to your image of God than having him reliant on chance. And I’m sorry, but if mutational errors can “change the course of evolution”, and “a mutational error favoured by natural selection or by God may have arranged our human evolution”, and the most your God can do is “allow” these mutations to survive, he is reliant on chance. And only a couple of days ago, your emphatic response to my objections was: “What is wrong with a random chance mutation, if it fits God’s plan to be allowed to pass through??? Chance can play a role!!!” Lucky God, that chance threw up changes that enabled him to fulfil the goal you have imposed on him.

DAVID: During evolution He created backup editing for DNA errors to help control the evolutionary path to humans. Diseases that appeared from DNA errors during living, were not corrected by God, the dino cancer the best example.

What backup editing? According to you, if an evolutionary “error” occurred that was beneficial, he allowed it to survive. If it was not beneficial, he destroyed it. Your so-called backups could therefore only apply to the disease-causing errors, and you even claim that these are still to be found as we humans grapple with their consequences.

dhw: And we must continue to emphasize that these backup systems are also full of errors, once again demonstrating your God’s lack of control over his copy system. You have quite rightly acknowledged my earlier point that the copy systems are the same. And so you have him able to destroy all the bad errors relating to evolution, but incapable of destroying all the bad errors relating to death and disease. Do you not regard this as odd?

DAVID: Your confusion about living organisms is total. Errors while living are a tiny
percentage of DNA reproduction second by second as we live. What you seem to constantly misunderstand is that your body and mine is not the one we were born with and grew up with. Everything with the exception of bone that remodels and the brain that mainly reorganizes is changed!! Death has to occur: God doesn't worry about rare living errors. Your bold is off base.

My bold emphasizes your God’s lack of control. The fact that our bodies are constantly changing is totally irrelevant to this error theory of yours. According to you – but correct me if I’m wrong - he has designed a system that makes errors which may change the course of evolution and which may also cause disease and death. As regards the first, he can allow them to survive or he can destroy them. These are changes to evolution which he did not design, and this contradicts your first theory, which had him directly designing every life form. As regards the second, despite your protestations to the contrary, he worried about them to the extent that “He put in backups, so He was correcting as much as he could.” Backups make no sense if you try to apply them to the first category of error. And it also makes no sense to claim that, although all the errors took place in the same system, he could destroy all the bad errors but he could not destroy all the bad errors.