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

by dhw, Saturday, August 29, 2020, 12:07 (1545 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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?).

DAVID: The bolds show you don't understand the biochemistry of life. I've told you, the large majority of our cells are in constant cell division, and the made-up statistic is to try to give you an approximation of the magnitude of the needed editing protections to maintain proper DNA which is almost always what results.

This whole thread is devoted to the errors, i.e. when things go wrong. I don’t know how cancer turns up out of constant reproduction. I thought it was the consequence of errors in the reproduction, as are so many of the diseases that your God tried but failed to control and so has left to us to correct. We've left Talbott behind now, and this thread is also devoted to “God’s error corrections”. If you wish to change it to “all the things God got right in the first place”, then start a new thread.

dhw: ...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: Again denigration of my view of God.

And not denigration of God, as you put it. I regard your view of your God as denigrating, in so far as you have him designing a system which produces errors that he cannot prevent or control, even though he tries his best to do so. My proposal is that the system he designed is the system he wanted to design.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: 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.

David: What you fail to see as you criticize the picture of God I present, is the surprisingly great success rate of a living high-speed system in which protein molecules are relied upon to act correctly.

You said you started this thread because you wanted to find a way of explaining the errors. Now all you want to talk about are the successes.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: The bold is your total distortion of the points in this discussion I have presented. God does not 'PRODUCE ERRORS'. The problem is they cannot be prevented but can be edited out most of the time. Still your warts. Stick to wonderment with me. The red is your constant humanizing purposes for God we can not validate in any way.

If God designed a system which produces errors, he produced errors even though he didn’t want to. This is hardly a total distortion. You started the thread hoping to explain the errors, and now that your explanations have created a mass of contradictions, all you want to talk about is what went right instead of what went wrong. I join you in wonderment at the former, but that is no reason for changing the subject. You grumbled at the narrowness of my concepts, and I have listed the broad variety of my concepts. The narrowness of your concepts, and the consequent accumulation of contradictions, is epitomized by your refusal to consider any proposal that endows God with any human attributes, although you agree that he probably has thought patterns and attributes similar to ours.