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

by dhw, Sunday, September 13, 2020, 12:51 (1530 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I have inadvertently exposed your underlying bias. I remember your championship of catastrophe theories. You tend to always emphasize the dark side of reality. Errors are rare when the whole picture is analyzed. Note today's comment on DNA translation and error controls and your bleak outlook below:

dhw: You focused on disease-causing errors, and twisted yourself in knots by saying God didn’t care about them and yet provided backups, though sometimes these didn’t work and he left it to us to correct what he couldn’t correct. All I have done is (a) try to unravel your tangled web of thought and (b) offer an alternative interpretation of the “errors”. We are completely united in our wonderment at the miracle of life and all the things that work.

DAVID: Your history of my stream of consciousness ignores present thought, which is all that counts.

By tomorrow the present will be the past. Your present explanation for your God’s failure to provide successful backups to correct disease-causing errors is that I shouldn’t look on the bleak side but should consider the successes. I hope that by tomorrow you will have realized that this is not a very satisfactory explanation.

dhw: ... My alternative, however, proposes a God who knows what he wants and designs it as he wants it, i.e. giving cells the freedom to be nice or nasty, and by extension to design their own ways of survival, thereby leading to the supercolossal variety of life forms and natural wonders that make up the history of our wonderful world. And no “errors” or futile attempts to control them. Just a theory, and it’s not “bleak”. It’s simply a different interpretation of your God’s capabilities and intentions.

DAVID: Yes it is, your usual concept of God who is not in control and lets things fester on their own. My God is in total control of history.

"Not in contro"l and letting things "fester" is YOUR concept! You tell us he couldn’t prevent the disease-causing errors, provided wonderful backups etc,, but left it to us to correct the “errors” he couldn’t correct. And a God who can’t prevent errors, and WANTS to correct them but can’t, is NOT in total control. That was why you even boasted that you were the one “willing to show that God is not all-powerful and all-knowing and He can’t stop molecular errors in a system he created.” This is not past “stream of consciousness”. He still can’t stop them and he still can’t correct them, and he still leaves them to us to correct. Only now you have him in total control, so long as we ignore the mere 0.000001% of errors (e.g. cancer) he couldn’t correct. It's not the successes you need to explain! It's the failures!

dhw: I certainly wouldn’t describe your God as impotent, but if he created a system which produced errors he couldn’t control, though he really wanted to control them, I don’t see how you can avoid the conclusion that this entails a degree of incompetence. You say he couldn’t have done it otherwise. I say maybe he didn’t WANT to do it otherwise. Which of these theories is more respectful of your God’s powers?

DAVID: It is not a matter of respect.

You accused me of denigrating your God. Your version has him wanting, trying, and failing to control certain“errors”. Wanting, trying and failing = incompetence. But if he INTENDED to design what you call the “errors”, there is no incompetence. Which of these theories is more denigrating to God?

DAVID: The bold fits my analysis of the biochemistry of life. From yesterdays entry: "I think a more complex system of molecular controls using more chaperoning molecules would have been too cumbersome resulting in reactions that were too slow for the high speed results required in life."

Very impressive, but nothing to do with your interpretation of your God’s intentions and subsequent actions! Once more: you say he didn’t WANT the “errors” and tried to correct them. I suggest he wanted the molecules to have their freedom – not as “errors” but as the very foundations of evolution, producing the huge variety of life forms (including nasty ones) that make up life’s history.

DAVID: Your reaction is the same as I brought out earlier. You see the bad side as the colored sentence indicates. I see the good side of what God created. Reviewing my stream of consciousness is beside the point of current discussion. Try sticking to where we are now. This problem of errors had to be covered for completeness. Why did you say I proposed "we shouldn't think about them". That was never my intent in bringing up the entire subject, which has you still in total confusion and bias about God's abilities.

Your stream of consciousness is highly relevant because your current explanation is as confused as your previous explanations. You have not covered the problem of error, and I don’t know why you brought up the subject in the first place, since all you want us to do is forget about evolutionary “errors”, which merely constitute “slight variations”, and forget about disease-causing errors, since they merely constitute 0.000001% of the system. Nor do I understand why you are so averse to the possibility that your God might have designed precisely the system he WANTED to design, as I have proposed above.