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

by dhw, Sunday, August 30, 2020, 09:05 (1544 days ago) @ David Turell

We've left Talbott behind, and this belongs to the "errors" thread, but we may as well carry on here.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: The point of the error discussion is to show you that despite the errors the vast majority of all organisms continue through their lives unchanged due to the excellent editing, the exact opposite of tack you take in your interpretations. Your bias is showing.

What bias? A few days ago you wrote: “The ability to have errors bothered me, so I had to work out a theory that settled my mind by bouncing it off your scepticism which in its confusion is quite helpful.” The theory you came up with initially was that the evolutionary errors could change the course of evolution, so your God only allowed those that he thought were beneficial, and he didn’t care about the disease-causing errors, although he provided backups, but even these sometimes didn’t work. You asked me to forget all about the first theory, because you didn’t like to side with Darwin on the subject of random mutations and natural selection, or with me when I “bounced” back the image of a God who was not only incompetent but also uncaring. And so evolutionary errors turned into slight variations that we needn’t bother about, and disease-causing errors only amount to 0.0000001% of all errors, so we shouldn’t worry about them. What we should do is:

DAVID: Concentrate on the amazing accuracy of his editing system.

You were bothered by the errors and set out to find a theory that would settle your mind. Congratulations. You have settled your mind by deciding not to bother about the errors at all and just to focus on all the successes. Even better, having raised the problem, you can now blame me for bothering about it.

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.

dhw: If God designed a system which produces errors, he produced errors even though he didn’t want to. This is hardly a total distortion.
Re humanizing, see “Back to David’s Theory of Evolution”.

DAVID: What a twisted line of thought. The errors are in His system, but that [doesn’t] mean He caused them. Errors are accidents of function. If another car runs into yours is that your fault?

Silly analogy. If someone designs a car with "errors" that make it break down, whose fault is it?