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

by dhw, Wednesday, September 09, 2020, 07:25 (1534 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You have ignored the point that we do not know if another alternate biochemical living system constantly at work in production of product and reproduction is possible.

dhw: You told me I didn’t understand the biochemistry, and I pointed out that your God’s intentions have nothing to do with biochemistry. Now you switch to whether another system is possible. We don’t know. So how does that prove your God didn’t deliberately design this system, as opposed to having to look for ways of correcting unavoidable errors?

DAVID: You refuse to recognize we can only study the system God gave us. As a biochemist I cannot imagine a system in which the molecular changes are totally under control except in a very cumbersome setup that would run sluggishly.

We are not discussing what systems your God might and might not have come up with. My proposal is based firmly on the system we have, and with my theist hat on, I have proposed that the system we have may be precisely the system he wanted. He gave molecules the freedom to do their own thing. You have admitted this: they are free to disobey his instructions. And so the baddies do nasty things (we’re talking now about disease-making errors) and the goodies do nice things to try and correct them, and you don’t need to have your God faffing around trying and frequently failing to stop the baddies, and then saying “Ach, I’ll leave it to the humans.”

DAVID: He fully foresaw its problems and introduced magnificent editing systems. Perfectly logical and based on fact.

dhw: It is a fact that the system works wonderfully well except when it doesn’t. You started out by trying to explain the errors, and you have finished up by trying to ignore the errors. A particular problem is the “errors” that cause disease, which he tried to correct but in many cases couldn’t, although he actually designed the “errors” that cause ageing and death, because these are “required”. See below.

DAVID: A full distortion of my presentation. I've pointed out that many editing systems that are marvelously accurate as required. Errors presented, not ever ignored.

But you keep telling us to focus on the successes! You say the diseases only count as 0.000001% of the system, so we should look at how well it all works! Your presentation of the errors is as I have described before: first you said he didn’t care, then he provided backups, some of which didn’t work, and so he left it to humans to do what he couldn’t do. This presentation is as messy as that for evolutionary “errors”, which began by changing the course of evolution, making your God dependent on chance (and converting you to the Darwinian theory of random mutations), and finished up as insignificant “minor variations” that had no effect on evolution.

DAVID: Cellular garbage is handled beautifully by God's systems. Cells are factories in constant production and they have been given ways to get rid of unnecessary byproducts and broken machinery. All logical.

dhw: Of course it’s logical. It’s also logical to propose that as evolution progressed, and the factories produced the rubbish, the intelligent directors of the factory responded by devising means of getting rid of the rubbish, as opposed to their “being given” those means. (Of course your God may have given the owners the intelligence to invent those means.) Why do you have to call the rubbish an “error”? Are you simply trying once more to distract attention from the earlier mess by focusing on your God’s successes?

DAVID: Some of the garbage is misfolded molecules (errors).

Fine. What about the rest? Your whole errors theory is based on the assumption that whatever goes wrong is not your God’s fault, but look how well he has done in correcting the errors: evolutionary errors are insignificant, forget about diseases, and he invented a method of garbage disposal. And now we come to the next anomaly:

DAVID: How species age. A view of the mechanism:
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-insights-aging.html

DAVID: This review shows us how God designed in a large portion of the aging mechanism. The last comment in the article indicates the role of wearing out.

dhw: Yes, one of the great incongruities in your "error" theory: your always-in-control-except-when-he-isn’t-in-control God deliberately designed the mechanisms for ageing and death, so they are not errors, but he could not possibly have designed the mechanisms for disease, which you may know as a retired doctor are errors that can cause death. Apparently these were not his fault, and he tried his best to correct them, but often failed and so left it to good folk like you to correct.

DAVID: Your usual muddled approach. Because of errors God has editing systems in place.

Your usual muddled approach. According to your theory, there are no editing systems in place for ageing and for death from old age, because those were designed, but there are editing systems in place for accidental but unavoidable disease-causing errors, which kill organisms of all ages, only the editing systems don’t work a lot of the time so we humans have to correct what your God couldn’t correct. This whole thread is a tangled mess and I do wish you would cut it and move on.