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

by dhw, Monday, September 21, 2020, 10:48 (1522 days ago) @ David Turell

Many apologies. I was interrupted yesterday but thought I'd posted this!

DAVID: I don't know if God intervenes at this time, but what He has provided us attests to His extreme attention to purpose. From history I do not interpret God as you do.

dhw: I have always agreed that if God exists, he is purposeful, and I know only too well that you have a fixed view of that purpose allied to an illogical view of how he achieved it. Now please tell me why my proposal does not fit in with the history of life as we know it.

DAVID: How God works is logical to me. But you fill Him with humanized reasons for His works. They fit history from a human viewpoint, which I do not think is God's.

So why do you think he wanted to correct the disease-causing errors? And what have you learned about your Gods viewpoint from the fact that he failed to do so and left it to humans to do what he couldn’t do?

dhw: […] If your sole intention had been to praise God for all that he had achieved, why did you open the discussion by arguing that the errors were not his fault and were out of his control, and therefore he could only “allow” errors to change the course of evolution, and he did not care about errors that caused disease, although he did provide backups which didn’t always work? You want me to ignore all this now, but it was you who raised the subject and provided these explanations.

DAVID: You are again repeating my stream of consciousness approach to the issue, at no real purpose in advancing the discussion. The whole issue occurred to me one day and I jumped in without full analysis of how to present it. I apologize for the haphazard handling of it. My analysis now is quite clear: God knew He had a problem, but this system of creating life is probably the best one available, but it is the only one we know to make judgements from.

We are not making judgements. Assuming that God exists, we’re trying to understand his intentions, methods and nature as manifested through the history of life. I appreciate your honesty regarding your initial attempts to solve the problem, but your “clear analysis” hasn’t solved it. Your “probably” means nothing more than that God probably couldn’t have done anything else, and your often repeated conclusion – not mentioned here – is that we should only think about the successes and not the failures. I can only repeat that the successes are NOT the problem!

dhw: This is not a denial of all the wonders – they are not a problem that needs to be explained. You raised the problem of the non-successes, and now you want to wash your hands of it.

DAVID: I haven't washed my hands of it. I raised it because it had to be raised, not hidden. And I've presented a logical view of God's response, but because errors persist you have gotten bent out of shape, while I've not had my faith in God shaken. Explanation: depending upon molecules to do their thing without tight controls allows the high speed required. That is an obvious biochemical fact. That analysis satisfies any discomfort I might have had.

I’m not trying to shake your faith in God’s existence (or do you mean more than just his existence?) and I’m not querying the biological facts. You knew these before you raised the subject, and for twelve years you have presented us with all the marvels of your God’s successes. So what caused your discomfort if it wasn’t the fact that some of the errors have NOT been corrected? In any case, your current comfort still doesn’t invalidate the alternative I have proposed, and which at last you have acknowledged fits in with the history of life as we know it.

DAVID: It doesn't contradict history. It is your humanizing approach to God. God produces everything He wants, not enjoying the random errors that might appear to produce His wonders so He can enjoy them. Weird theology.

I don’t understand this version of my proposal. You have accepted the possibility that your God enjoys his creations. My proposal is that the freedom you say he gave molecules to disobey his instructions was not an unavoidable consequence of the only system he could possibly design, but was the deliberately chosen foundation of the whole evolutionary process. He gave cells the freedom to maintain the status quo, or to go their own way in the quest to improve their chances of survival. You yourself have had him watching it all with interest and not intervening, and I simply put the process back to the start of evolution: invention of the process which he then watches with interest. (But I have always agreed that he could intervene if he wanted to, which might possibly explain extinctions.) Your mantra about “humanization” is irrelevant. Nobody knows his thoughts, but even you have agreed that he probably has thought patterns, emotions and other attributes similar to ours. This “theology” is certainly no weirder than one in which an all-powerful God designs a system which produces errors he can’t control, even though he wants to, and even tries to, but eventually leaves to humans to do what he couldn’t do.