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

by dhw, Sunday, August 23, 2020, 13:35 (1551 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You still don't seem to understand molecular errors. […] God cannot control their mistakes, and He knew it as He created life.

Which errors are you talking about – evolutionary or disease-causing? According to you, your no longer all-powerful God was able to destroy evolutionary errors he didn’t like, but he couldn’t destroy all the disease-causing ones and so had to provide backups, but even those didn’t always work.

DAVID: He didn't want them, which is why we see the vastly complex editing systems that are present during reproduction of cell splitting. Life with error corrections had to be designed all at once at the beginning of life or nothing would have survived.

This is getting very confusing. He had to design a system full of errors (presumably the disease-causing category) he didn’t want and couldn’t control, and so at the same time he designed corrections to the errors (= he could control them). Why did/do the errors persist?

DAVID: Note output of reproduction in cell splitting is 99.999999.....+% accurate because of the editing.

What “editing”? If “life with error corrections had to be designed all at once at the beginning of life”, when and what did he edit? What is this 99.99+% based on? You wrote that “autoimmune diseases are mistakes of the genetic immune system” which we’ve been left to correct, so it appears that these errors only constitute 0.000001%of the system your God designed in order to give and maintain life and which he already corrected at the beginning of life, though actually he didn’t.

DAVID: I see my purposeful God not wanting errors at all, while your weak mamby-pamby humanized God creates a diverse unorganized bush by accidents/ errors.

Your purposeful God designs something he doesn’t want, and has to correct whatever he can. Apparently this makes him strong, whereas designing something that would give him what he wants (a diverse bush of life forms that come and go) makes him weak and nambypamby.

DAVID: And we also know through Behe, most advances are precise DNA deletions. Factor these facts into your answer, as I do.

dhw: How does Behe’s theory invalidate the theory of cellular intelligence? If your God could delete DNA, so could intelligent cells.

DAVID: The cells would have to foretell their future needs. Not likely.

No they wouldn’t. The cells would restructure themselves when new conditions required change or offered new opportunities. Cells do not restructure themselves in advance of new requirements. You have confirmed this:

DAVID: I view God as in charge of all speciation. He has to change an earlier species to the next. Therefore, since species adapt to new problems, God must review those alterations to be sure they are on course to the next planned step.

You now have him changing earlier species and then reviewing his own changes (alterations) to be sure he hasn’t messed up his own plans! Or could you mean that they made their own changes as they adapted to new problems (enter cellular intelligence) or changed by random mutations, so that he had to decide whether to allow them to survive (out goes design)?

DAVID: Pre-programming is supported by Behe's work on devolving DNA and by the comparative anatomy of species as they evolve. Certainly there is common descent.

Does Behe tell you God preplanned every new response to every new problem? And were the first cells really born with potential hands, wings, fins, but subsequently cell communities discarded whichever of these they didn’t need? Comparative anatomy simply shows that once a new organ proved itself to be useful, it underwent all kinds of variations as life forms adapted to new conditions.

DAVID: I still stick to the idea that the God of the Bible may not be so all powerful, that He doesn't have to correct Himself in pre-planned code.

I like it. A nice piece of “humanizing”. If your God now has to correct himself, you might just as well have him experimenting, or getting new ideas as he goes along. But in the past, you insisted on sticking to the all-powerful God of the Bible.

dhw: As far as the disease-causing errors are concerned, we are still left with the claim that he was and is not bothered about them, but he provided backups.

DAVID: He cared about us continuing to live or life would have ended in nothing but endless errors. Not the endpoint He desired. What I said was He didn't care if some mistakes caused death, which is/was required , as you have agreed.
And later: Death is required now and during evolution. During evolution God did not stop fatal DNA mistakes (cancer), as shown. We are in charge now using the giant brains God gave us to learn how to do the necessary corrections as far as we can.

Our endpoint is death, and since it is required, are you telling us that your God did or did not deliberately design “errors” (including mistakes of the genetic immune system) that can lead to death? Did he want disease or didn’t he? Has he left us to correct mistakes he couldn’t correct himself, or to correct mistakes he designed to kill us? Did/does he care or didn’t/doesn’t he? In response, you asked if I didn’t consider him “a kindly God”. A nice piece of “humanizing”