Back to David's theory of evolution: God's error corrections (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 02, 2020, 11:35 (1541 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Since death was “required”, disease-causing errors were essential, but if some nasty molecules had the freedom to find ways of killing us, other molecules had the freedom to find ways of fighting the nasty molecules. (Hence the ever evolving immune system, and human ingenuity in finding cures.) But even if they succeeded, your God had built in death from old age. Isn’t this a better analogy, and a more respectful one for your God, who in your version has lost control, tries to regain it but sometimes fails?

DAVID:[…] Stop trying to revise what you apparently think is a terrible version of my God.

dhw: It is you who insist that your God could not prevent the disease-causing errors arising from the system he designed, tried to stop or correct them, but sometimes failed. What have I “revised”? My analogy proposes that he designed precisely what he wanted to design. What is your objection?

DAVID: The bold is right on point. God knew the consequences of what He designed. You and I seem to interpret the results of that design differently. You think He enjoyed having errors, and I feel He tried carefully to edit them out.

I have not said that he enjoyed the errors! Enjoyment of his own creativity is one possible reason for his creating the ever-changing spectacle of life in the first place. (You demanded that I should ignore what you call the 0.000001% of errors and wonder at the successes. Why shouldn’t he also wonder at his successes?) Knowing the consequences of errors he did not want is not the same as designing what he wanted!

DAVID: My point still is first life had to be designed with immunity defense mechanisms when the organisms appeared. They didn't appear by chance.

dhw: Your point was what I have bolded above. [David's claim that a particular form of immunity had to be designed into the first appearance of each new species.] Hence my answer. Thank you for agreeing with my correction. I have no idea when nice first life and nasty first life appeared, but I would suggest that both were equipped with the means of attacking or defending. My proposed means for both is a form of intelligence, and this may have been designed by your God.

DAVID: I'll stick with God.

No problem. My point here is that both the goodies and the baddies must have had means of defending/attacking, and I propose that this means was/is a form of intelligence. Thank you for not disagreeing.

DAVID: God in charge of evolution edits to produces what He wishes.

dhw: According to the latest edition of your evolutionary errors theory, they were just “slight variations” which he allowed through because they would not change the course of evolution. (dhw's bolds in view of David's "conjuring" trick below.)

DAVID: Correct.

dhw: But now, up there in bold ["In advancing evolution God cannot trust a DNA design mechanism totally on its own!"], you’ve got your God personally operating on a group of Moroccan brains because he himself “cannot trust” the mechanism he designed. So fear of what errors would have made him intervene and directly expand pre-sapiens brains? To keep on living, each organism needs the system to work without uncorrectable errors. According to you, he could not prevent errors, tried his best to correct them, created backups which didn’t always work, and finally left it to us to correct the errors he couldn’t correct. However, these apparently amount to only 0.000001% of the system, so you wrote: “stick to wonderment with me”, and “the point of the error discussion is to show you that despite the errors the vast majority of all organisms continue throughout their lives unchanged due to the excellent editing”, and I should “concentrate on the amazing accuracy of his editing system”.

DAVID: You have conjured up a strange paragraph of words by again seemingly to conflate errors while living with errors while evolving. Two totally different issues from the same source of trouble. Errors while living are mostly edited out, but some get by. For evolutionary advances God carefully codes DNA/genomes to insure properly planned advances in form and function. Clear???

There is no conflation! My paragraph started by pointing out the anomaly of your God not trusting his own evolutionary system and having to perform a brain operation because of possible “slight variations” that would have no influence on the course of evolution! I then asked you a question, which you have not answered. I went on to deal with your statement that “to keep on living each organism needs precise editing”, and assumed you would realize we were now talking about disease-causing errors. You had earlier denied that your solution to this problem was to tell me to forget about them and only think about the successes, and so I provided the relevant quotes. You do not help your case by constantly manufacturing and demolishing your own straw men and by changing the subject instead of directly responding to the arguments!