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

by dhw, Friday, September 11, 2020, 14:08 (1532 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God created the best system He could. Free to react molecules can work faster than molecules encumbered by precise hands on molecules. The freedom is required. Again you ignore the evidence God knew of the problems related, by the magnificent editing systems in place.

dhw: The magnificent editing systems are not the problem! The problem arises when those magnificent editing systems fail to edit out the “errors” that cause untold suffering and death (disregarding the apparently specially designed mechanism for ageing and death from old age - see below).

DAVID: Mountain out of mole hill, ignoring the point that most lives are long and errorless.

I really don’t know why you raised the subject of “errors” if all you want us to do is ignore the errors. Those that result in untold suffering and death are the problem, and I’m sure you didn’t tell your young patients who were dying of cancer that they were making a mountain out of a molehill and they should only think about all the folk who were living till their nineties and would eventually die of old age.

dhw: If your God gave molecules the freedom to disobey, others are free to obey, so why should he not also have given them the freedom to come up with counter measures to thwart those nasty molecules that cause diseases?

DAVID: Have you forgotten the marvelous editing systems God provided? You like to denigrate them to make God look like He doesn't know what he is doing or is out of control.
And later:
DAVID: Of course you have done what I expected, overemphasized the quantity of errors to emphasize how bad the errors are, and it makes God look bad. I brought the errors into this discussion to point out how carefully God studied the living system He created for us, which I believe is the only system He could create. He put in the editing systems to counteract the problem and I think He has done a magnificent job. I practiced for many years and I know the genome errors I ran into were few. I brought up the error problem because it had to be dealt with rationally, and I feel I've done that.

Same again. Your idea of a “rational” explanation is to tell us that the errors your God could NOT successfully “edit” are a mere molehill, and we should only think of all those lucky people who die of old age. And it is you who have denigrated your God by telling us that he could not control the errors produced by the system he designed. You then changed your tune and tried to switch the subject to how well he has controlled them. Have you forgotten your own statement that he did the best he could, but some of his backups didn’t work and so he left it to us humans to correct what he couldn’t correct?

dhw: Maybe this freedom was not accidental, unavoidable and in need of correction at all. Maybe it was what God wanted.

DAVID: Those 'free' molecules were exactly what God required to have a high-speed living system. I've explained. You've ignored or forgotten the point.

I have not forgotten it – I have used it to propose a theory different from yours. Instead of him designing a living system in which free molecules accidentally produced errors which he could not prevent, I suggest that he designed the system because he wanted the molecules to have the freedom to produce what you call the “errors”. And I have expanded this proposal (theistic version) not only to his giving molecules the freedom to be nice or nasty, but also to his giving cells the freedom in general to work out their own ways of improving their chances of survival, which would explain the vast variety of life forms, diseases, cures, failure to cure etc. without any talk of “errors" or your God’s inability to prevent them and to provide effective backups against some of the nasty ones etc. It would simply mean that he designed precisely what he wanted to design.