Back to David's theory of evolution: Talbott on cell death (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, August 24, 2020, 13:10 (1550 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Cells are constantly dying and reproducing and must do this as errorless as possible. Talbott's description illustrates:
https://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/bk/thesis_34.htm

The whole article can be summed up by this one quote:

TALBOTT: These narrative achievements, which might seem to require a remarkable and practiced synchronization of activities, are accomplished, as we saw a moment ago, despite the fact that the innumerable molecules involved possess many degrees of freedom as they diffuse through the cell’s plasm.

The focus is on the success of the system, whereas you began our discussion by focusing on the errors. I cannot find a single reference here to your God correcting or editing errors he can/can’t control. Your own comment also lays stress on the success of the system, and I will reply point by point:

DAVID: These disconnected but profound excerpts from Talbott should be carefully read, and clearly explain why I am so concerned with error control. [dhw: No they don’t.] Despite constant death and reproduction the vast majority of all organisms live from birth to life without problems. [dhw: It is the problems that we are concerned with, and I’m surprised that as a doctor you do not count diseases as errors your God can’t/couldn’t correct and which apparently he has left us humans to grapple with. Earlier you also emphasized the huge role that errors played in the advance of evolution, but subsequently reduced this to “slight variations” which had no effect on evolution. See my final comment.] It is due to instructive and editing mechanisms which help control the seeming chaos of the watery interior of the active cell. As I consider God the author of all this messy arrangement, it is my point that God created both life's instructed processes but also the error controls from the very advent/beginning of life. HE HAD TO or there would have been a very short tenure for life. The errors were not God's desire or any part of His intent. [dhw: So he designed the system, did not want and could not control the errors, and yet simultaneously designed controls for the errors he could not control, many of which don't work so it's up to us to correct them. And don't forget that he required death - see below.] Life emerges from the actions and interactions of thousands of simultaneous molecular processes. We know of no other way it could have been designed. [dhw: Agreed. Maybe we are ignorant.] I will state that for God there was no other way. [dhw: Who knows?] You cannot defend your constant inferences God desires errors either during evolution or during just living.[dhw: Whoa! Nobody forced him to invent physical life and death! If he exists, that was what he wanted. You believe he is immortal and conscious, so if he’d wanted an immortal, conscious being, he could have invented one – and some folk believe he has done just that, when they talk of our “immortal soul”. Why are you so rigidly opposed to the idea that whatever he produced is what he WANTED to produce?] No one knows the rate of protection from errors. My guess in in the trillions every day. [dhw: Not bad for a God who can’t control the errors. But in any case, this discussion centres upon the errors (a) against which we are NOT protected: those that still cause disease and death and which he has left to us to correct, and (b) which earlier in your posts changed the course of evolution but now play an insignificant role, which makes me wonder why you bothered to mention them in the first place.]