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

by dhw, Friday, September 04, 2020, 09:21 (1539 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I think the paragraph from me above your reply is quite clear as to how I view God handling errors that cannot be controlled. Separating considerations of errors while living from errors in evolution has been a problem. I think that separation is clear now. I'm not demolished if you are not, and thanks to you I have a clear theory about it all.

dhw: I appreciate the acknowledgement, but the separation has always been clear and has never been a problem. The problems have been twofold: 1) You began by arguing that evolutionary errors could change the course of evolution and God could do nothing but allow or destroy them, and you have finished by arguing that evolutionary errors can’t change the course of evolution and God can edit them. That is now clear. 2) You began by telling us that disease-causing errors were not God’s fault, he did his best to correct them, and has left it to us to go on trying to correct them (though at the same time you said he didn’t bother about them). Now you are telling us that they only amount to 0.000001% of the total system, and we should concentrate on all the success stories instead. I find both proposals extremely dissatisfying and surprisingly disrespectful towards your God, who emerges as incompetent. I have proposed that the system he designed, complete with so-called “errors”, is precisely the system he wanted to design, giving molecules the freedom to do their own designing, attacking and defending. It's still not clear to me why this proposal is unacceptable to you.

DAVID: God's incompetence is your interpretation in bold, certainly not mine.

A God who created a system that produces errors, does his best to correct them, sometimes fails and leaves it to us to do what he could not do, seems to me to be incompetent.

DAVID: The red colored sentence is not what molecules do. They are under God's instructions for their actions.

But they are free to make "mistakes"! You keep telling us that your God can’t prevent them from doing so! The difference between us is that you say it’s not his fault and, in the case of disease-producing errors, he does his best to correct them. I propose that he deliberately gave them their freedom, and indeed that is what has led to the vast variety of life’s bushes (evolutionary "errors") and also to the required phenomenon of death (disease-causing "errors").

DAVID: All I have said is they can make a mistake in proper folding and God put in editing mechanisms to limit those mistakes, because He recognized the problem in advance. What you do not understand is that the system is miraculously accurate and you seem surprised when I point it out. Think about it. It is the only living system we know. I view it as probably the only system God could develop.

And there you go again: I should concentrate on the successes. I agree with you completely: life and reproduction and evolution are miraculously wonderful, but you have raised the subject of errors and now you want me to ignore them!

DAVID: There are physico-chemical limits to what can work. I'm not feeling disrespectful at all, and am surprised at your total misinterpretation of how I feel about God's work.

I have explained above why I think your interpretation is disrespectful: you assume that God tried and failed to correct some of the disease-causing errors in the system he designed. (Let’s not bother with the evolutionary errors, which initially had you reversing all your own beliefs in design and his direct control over evolution and instead relying on random mutations.) The alternative I offer is that he designed what he wanted to design. Far more respectful.