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

by dhw, Wednesday, August 26, 2020, 07:49 (1548 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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 You have yourself already withdrawn some of them, though not all: 1) your God – who varies between being all-powerful and not being all-powerful (I see you’re back to all-powerful today),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?

DAVID: 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.

I’m a little surprised to see your blatant contradictions described in terms of my confusion, but we’ll let that pass. If evolutionary errors are of no consequence, I don't know why they bothered you. The “errors” that cause disease and death bother us all. I still don’t understand how you can say in one breath that your God can’t control them, but he can control them by means of editing systems, but the thought occurs to me that what you meant is that he can’t PREVENT them. I hope that helps. But if he installed editing systems from the beginning of life, surely they should have edited out the errors before they even appeared! For example, cancer is a typical “error”. Clearly he did NOT install an editing system to remove the cancerous cells. And so he’s apparently left it to us to work out an “editing” system. Ditto every disease you can think of that requires human intervention. Your original explanation was that he didn’t care. What is your explanation now?

dhw: 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?

DAVID: 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.

We see the same image because the system is working, not because this “editing system” is constantly correcting errors. The problem is errors that are not corrected (e.g. cancer), and lead to disease and death, which your God “required”. How could he have ensured death without ensuring that there were errors that could not be corrected?