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

by dhw, Tuesday, September 22, 2020, 12:58 (1521 days ago) @ David Turell

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?

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

And you don’t regard your God’s concern for our welfare as “humanizing”? Your objection to my theory now turns out to be that your humanized version of God is different from my humanized version of God.

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!

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

That is not a reversal! You’ve hit the nail on the head: the failures are the problem. And so you don’t want to think about them.

dhw: I’m not trying to shake your faith in God’s existence (or do you mean more than just his existence?)…

I’d be interested to know the answer to this question.

dhw: …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: 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.

Yes, a lovely, comforting, humanized version of your God. But it doesn’t invalidate the fact that you yourself have him giving molecules/cells the freedom to do their own thing. And that opens the way to a free-for-all that produces the whole of evolution as well as the struggle for supremacy between the “goodies” and the “baddies”. You acknowledge that it fits in with the history of life on Earth. If you want to speculate on which human thought patterns, emotions and other attributes this might involve, that’s up to you, but you can hardly dismiss the theory on the grounds that it “humanizes” your God, since your own theory is based on your firm belief that God would not allow harm to his creations. Quite apart from error-prone cells and nasty bacteria and viruses, look what else he designed:

QUOTE: Australia’s funnel-web spiders are deadly to humans – particularly the males from the species Atrax robustus that calls Sydney home – but how they evolved to do this has been a mystery.

DAVID: How did the spider figure out it could produce a neurotoxin to stun predators and protect itself. This reeks of design, not chance evolution.

So he deliberately designed a spider whose poison is deadly to humans. He designed it before humans came on the scene, but according to you, everything he designed was “part of the goal of evolving humans”. And did he design the spider and the harmful bacteria and viruses without realizing they would be harmful to his creations? And how about carnivores – didn’t he realize that meat-eating would be harmful to some of his creatures?