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

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 25, 2020, 19:06 (1549 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Your bias misses the way I view the problem in a totally and apparently incomprehensible way to you. We live with a biological system in which molecules are free to make mistakes. The problem for one (not you) who believes in an all-powerful (probable for me) God, it requires an explanation I can live with. I had to work it out and I have for my own satisfaction with entries on this website.

dhw: There is no point in going through all your statements and all my comments from the last post, as this post will lead to the same set of problems. I don’t know why you accuse me of bias just because I point out all the contradictions in your arguments. You have yourself already withdrawn some of them, though not all: 1) your God – who varies between being all-powerful and not being all-powerful (I see you’re back to all-powerful today), all-knowing and not all-knowing, controls errors which he can’t control. 2) He isn’t bothered about disease-causing errors, but he provides backups to correct them (even though he can’t correct them). He doesn’t care, but he does care. 3) Errors change the course of evolution, even to the extent that they may have organized our own evolution, and all he can do is “allow” them to survive if he likes them and kill them off if he doesn’t (God as natural selector), but such errors now turn out to be minor variations, and chance – at one time championed with multiple exclamation marks – now plays no role, so why bother to mention the evolutionary errors (random mutations) in the first place?

I've explained it clearly. The ability to have errors bothered me, so I had to work out a theory had settled my mind by bouncing it off your skepticism which in its confusion is quite helpful. During evolution minor mutation variations can be adopted/allowed as of no consequence, and major off-course ones are edited out as God speciates the next stage of evolution of all species. During life the errors are in the main controlled by editing systems provided by God from the beginning of life who knew full well about the problem.

DAVID: The massive editing systems tell me God obviously knew of the problem in advance (how could He not?) and prepared life for it.

dhw: How could he prepare life for it if he himself couldn’t control/correct mistakes, and now leaves it to us to sort out the mess? You have forgotten about death, which was “required” – obviously by him, since nobody else was around. If he required it, don’t you think his design would have deliberately been made to cause it and to cause the diseases (errors) that lead to death?

Your usual confusion. Death is required as we both agree, but living organisms living as long as they can is also required. Please remember our bodies are constantly in massive turn over as cells are replaced constantly, but you and I look in the mirror and see the same image. Why? God's error-correction editing systems work so well. Yet errors slip in that we have the smarts to correct in large part.

DAVID: I used Talbott from one point of my view. You don't interpret Talbott as ID and I do. He is amazed at the very purposeful activities in cells, and agency, but never a mention of God. I have no idea what he believe at that level of thought. He never allows it.

dhw: I think we are all amazed at the purposeful activities of cells. They might even be interpreted as evidence that cells are intelligent. But the issue here is your attempt to find an explanation of the errors that you can “live with”. I don’t think it’s my bias that has created all the above confusion, and Talbott is a red herring. See the other thread for more confusion.

As stated above I'm no longer puzzled and like my explanations. Talbott is no red herring. He expresses the organized chaos of the cell interior beautifully, which is what leads to molecular errors.