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

by dhw, Thursday, September 17, 2020, 10:30 (1526 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The same old dour view. And you've expressed how amazed you are at God's works in the past.

dhw: The same old refusal to discuss the problem, to recognize the importance of the errors your God was apparently incapable of correcting, to consider any alternative to your interpretation, to regard any opposition to your own fixed belief as “bias”, and to pretend that someone who shares your wonderment at all the miracles of life is “dour” and “bleak” and “clouded” and “pessimistic” because he wants to discuss the subject which you raised (evolutionary and disease-causing errors) and which you made a complete hash of. Fortunately, I know you well enough to believe that you would never have told your young patients that their fatal disease was of “minimal” importance, and they should be grateful for the fact that you have lived to a ripe old age.

DAVID: I brought up the issue because it is very important to fit it into any concept of God and how He designed life. I knew from the beginning the errors are a most important subject. The point is God recognized the problem from the beginning and His editing mechanisms are remarkably accurate, if not perfect. Obviously all errors are bad as was my first approach in raising this issue. All you have done is concentrate on the 'bad' aspect of it. God invented life and that is all-powerful to me. Your not-powerful wishy-washy god wanted errors to help make more diversity!!

But we have diversity, and diversity comes from changes to existing mechanisms! That is why initially you tied yourself in knots by equating what you call “errors” with random mutations that changed the course of evolution. I propose that if God exists, the system he designed, and which you yourself have said gives molecules (I prefer to broaden this to “cells”) the freedom NOT to stick to his instructions, may in fact have been designed in such a way that the cells had the freedom either to stick to instructions (maintain the status quo) or to create new combinations (= the process of evolution)
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Your second post:
“The entire process reduces replication errors around a thousand-fold, serving as one of our body’s best defenses against genetic mutations that can lead to cancer.”

Wonderful, except that cancer remains rife.

"Each system must first recognize the error and then know what to do; otherwise, the consequences can be catastrophic. In each case, the machinery is well designed and finely tuned to solve the problem, and it does so rapidly and efficiently. That takes foresight, and foresight implies intelligent design. As Marcos Eberlin says in his book Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose, “This act of anticipation — foresight — is not a characteristic of blind material processes. It is an act of intelligence, of a mind.'”

DAVID: In view of this repair complexity, the idea that God might have wanted the errors to add to diversity is laughable. He seriously didn't want them to the point of designing repair systems as complex as the living systems.

I am not disputing that the complexity of the cell and the system offers a cogent argument for design. I am disputing your interpretation of what you call errors – and also the above interpretation of how the machinery works. The article states: “Proofreading and repair systems had to be operational from the beginning of life.” I do not believe for one second that the very first cells were subject to cancer, and so I would suggest that the system itself would have evolved continuously as new demands were made on it, i.e. it reacted autonomously to new requirements. The article asks an all-important question:

QUOTE: “the machines involved show exquisite craftsmanship and efficient action to keep other parts — machines outside their own structural needs — humming along.
"How can they do that? How do they know? Such things do not just appear by blind material processes.”

One answer could be that (theistic version) God gave them the intelligence to respond to requirements. But NB that does not mean their intelligence is sufficient to counter the intelligence of other intelligent cells or organisms that pose a threat. The freedom to diverge from a single pattern allows what we would regard as the goodies and the baddies. And so you have a complete explanation not only for evolution but also for what you have called the “errors” that cause disease. Why do you find it laughable that the realities of evolution, including diseases, defences against disease, and the great bush of life itself, might all be precisely what your God wanted and might all stem from the freedom which you agree he gave to the cells he designed?