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

by dhw, Friday, August 28, 2020, 10:33 (1546 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God put in the editing systems because He knew all of the problems all along, despite designing life the best He could. As for cancer there are many editing systems which are put in place to prevent them in the copy-error prevention role played during cell division by many parts of the mechanism. I finally have the sense that you seem to begin to understand what I am portraying. I still view Him as all-powerful considering all He has created. What He cannot control are not warts!

dhw: I don’t know what editing systems prevent cancer, but I do know that whatever systems there are have not prevented cancer, and we humans continue to look for means to prevent, control or cure it. It would appear then that the problem was not that he didn’t care, but he tried his best and failed. We are back to your God’s incompetence, although he is all-powerful when he is not incompetent. Except that we have another problem: death is “required”.

DAVID: Your 'new' take as usual is to denigrate God. The editing systems are 99.9999999+% perfect but reproduction is constant, so cancer turns up.

This is not MY new take! It is you who tell us that he designed life “as best he could”, and despite your made-up statistic, you have told us that he has left us to correct the errors that he did not correct. I don’t know how cancer “turns up” out of constant reproduction (misprint?), but I do know that there are plenty of other diseases that also kill both young and old in spite of all the backups you say your God left behind to control the errors he could not control. The denigration of your God is yours – you have depicted him as incapable of controlling these disease-causing errors, whereas my proposal is that he deliberately created a system that would allow beneficial and deleterious changes, to produce the vast variety of life plus the ending of life through the “required” death. My God gets what he wants. Yours apparently doesn’t. Which of these is a denigration?

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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: As usual you have forgotten parts of the issue. Look in the mirror. I do. We are both aging, and that is built in. We will pass away with or without errors.

dhw: You have ignored my answer to your “mirror” argument, and totally ignored my question.

DAVID: Not ignored at all. Please recognize the point that aging itself without major disease exists. Many folks and animals just die from wearing out. We all have to die to make room. You may not like God for it, but aging is built in all by itself.

We are not discussing ageing or even death from old age! We are discussing death caused by diseases such as cancer, which your God tried to control and couldn’t. Originally, he didn’t care, but then in your "new take" you changed that to his lack of control, but never mind, it’s only 0.000001% of failure according to your research into causes of death.

dhw: If I believed in God, I could believe that he was capable of experimenting, of getting new ideas, of enjoying his creations, of deliberately leaving molecules and cells to do their own designing and make their own errors. But I would find it very hard to believe that he would be so incompetent as to try and correct mistakes he couldn’t prevent, fail, and simply leave it to us lesser beings to sort out the mess he had left behind.

DAVID: Your obvious bias is showing. I accept God despite all the warts you invent. Instead of expressing wonder at all He created, you carefully try and describe faults that don't exist in my mind. I didn't realize how narrow your concepts are.

The warts are your invention, not mine. It is you who have told us that he tried to correct the mistakes but couldn’t, and has left us to do our best. You know perfectly well that I share your wonderment at all the miracles of life, and I cannot see how my openness to such theistic theories as experimentation, having new ideas, enjoying his creations, giving organisms a free hand to do their own designing, make my concepts narrower than your own belief that your sometimes all-powerful God designs everything, produces errors which he can’t control, and faffs around for 3.X billion years directly designing anything but the one species (plus food supply) that he wants to design.