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

by dhw, Friday, August 21, 2020, 08:11 (1553 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I am correcting your distorted understanding, since I have introduced the FACT that living molecules can make mistakes and, therefore, during evolution errors involving new speciation have to be edited and corrected by God. Bad mutations are simply deleted. There is a possibility of 'good' slight variation on what God planned, and I can see Him allowing it. Note, only a possibility this happens, but I have to accept that mutations are occasionally 'good' ( as science shows) and account for how God might handle them.

dhw: What “distorted understanding”? I have repeated your own words, and asked you whether they still apply. Your response is as confusing as ever. Instead of these errors changing the course of evolution, and possibly even “arranging” our own evolution, they have suddenly become a mere possibility of “slight variation”. And yet they also “involve new speciation”! How does new speciation mean slight variation? And why does he have to correct the errors if they are good and he allows them go through? This whole theory is becoming more and more nebulous and confusing, but you accuse me of distorting it!

DAVID: Not nebulous to me. I am working on a very coherent theory to include errors in the genome during evolution. And you are helping. Genome errors during evolution require God editing is a simple response.

Glad to help. Here comes more help. Your response completely ignores my questions! How does “new speciation” come to mean “slight variation”, and why must God correct or “edit” errors that are good? What is there to correct? Previously he “allowed” them to survive, and he destroyed the bad ones. This is no different from Darwin’s natural selection, in which beneficial mutations survive and non-beneficial ones do not survive. Your God’s role in speciation therefore becomes as passive (i.e. non-designing) as that of natural selection.
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dhw: I pointed out to you that backups could only refer to errors involving disease and death, but you claimed he was not bothered about these. Why would he create backups if he was not bothered?

DAVID: He is trying to protect the living by having backups, but you asked about Him stepping in and correcting, and we know he doesn't.

You said he wasn’t bothered about the disease-causing errors during pre-sapiens evolution. Once more, please answer the question: why would he have created backups if he was not bothered?

dhw: And we haven’t even mentioned your passionate defence of the evolutionary role played by chance (“Chance can play a role!!!”) countered by “There is no reliance on chance”.

DAVID: With your help I've totally reconsidered my thinking about chance in regard to speciation. God accepts only minor variations in genome evolutionary changes. He is a precise editor.

See above re minor variations and “editing”.

dhw: It’s comforting to know that these discussions can result in such a U-turn. Perhaps eventually you will also sort out the muddle of what your God can and can’t control, and what he edits and what he designs. And perhaps you will even consider the possibility that your God deliberately invented a system in which molecules went their own free way, because that was what he wanted. At least this would restore some of the dignity you have tried so hard to take away from him – or have you also withdrawn your claim that you are “the one who is 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: I don't know how all-everything God is as the Bible describes. You make Him very human as you describe His thinking. Why blame me? The quote is a concession. Errors exist during living and must have existed during evolution, and so I must account for them with God in charge.

Why is it more “human” for him to create what he wanted to create than for him to create what he didn’t want to create and what he therefore had to keep trying (often unsuccessfully) to correct? The quote is a concession to what? You keep telling us he is all-powerful, but then you keep repeating that he can’t control the errors, which means he is not all-powerful. Furthermore, you keep repeating that he EDITS errors that lead to speciation. And so let me repeat: Firstly, errors involving speciation cannot be “slight variations”. Secondly, you don’t “edit” something that is already beneficial. Thirdly, “editing” means he does not design species but relies on chance to give him something to work on (except that there is no need for him to work on it), whereas elsewhere you keep telling us he directly designed all species. I hope this will help you to a clearer presentation of your so far very incoherent new theory!