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

by David Turell , Monday, September 21, 2020, 17:08 (1522 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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?

God created us. He didn't wish us ill. Error correction is constant in every day cell splitting.

dhw: 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!

The failures are a problem, but you keep reversing the results, that editing blocks most.

dhw: 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.

I'll repeat, it is difficult to imagine that God purposely allowed harm to his creations, and therefore added editing mechanisms to protect as much as possible.

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.

dhw: 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.

My answer to the bold is still He gave us the best biochemical system of life He could, recognizing the problems of errors from the beginning. The reverse of your negative view. Recognizing errors God had to maintain a hands-on tight control of evolution.