Back to David's theory of evolution: Talbott on cell death (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, August 28, 2020, 22:58 (1336 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Your 'new' take as usual is to denigrate God. The editing systems are 99.9999999+% perfect but reproduction is constant, so cancer turns up.

dhw: This is not MY new take! It is you who tell us that he designed life “as best he could”, and despite your made-up statistic, you have told us that he has left us to correct the errors that he did not correct. I don’t know how cancer “turns up” out of constant reproduction (misprint?),

The bolds show you don't understand the biochemistry of life. I've told you, the large majority of our cells are in constant cell division, and the made-up statistic is to try to give you an approximation of the magnitude of the needed editing protections to maintain proper DNA which is almost always what results.

dhw: ...my proposal is that he deliberately created a system that would allow beneficial and deleterious changes, to produce the vast variety of life plus the ending of life through the “required” death. My God gets what he wants. Yours apparently doesn’t. Which of these is a denigration?

Again denigration of my view of God:

DAVID: Your usual confusion. Death is required as we both agree, but living organisms living as long as they can is also required. Please remember our bodies are constantly in massive turn over as cells are replaced constantly, but you and I look in the mirror and see the same image. Why? God's error-correction editing systems work so well. Yet errors slip in that we have the smarts to correct in large part.

dhw: We see the same image because the system is working, not because this “editing system” is constantly correcting errors. The problem is errors that are not corrected (e.g. cancer), and lead to disease and death, which your God “required”. How could he have ensured death without ensuring that there were errors that could not be corrected?

DAVID: As usual you have forgotten parts of the issue. Look in the mirror. I do. We are both aging, and that is built in. We will pass away with or without errors.

dhw: You have ignored my answer to your “mirror” argument, and totally ignored my question.

DAVID: Not ignored at all. Please recognize the point that aging itself without major disease exists. Many folks and animals just die from wearing out. We all have to die to make room. You may not like God for it, but aging is built in all by itself.

dhw: We are not discussing ageing or even death from old age! We are discussing death caused by diseases such as cancer, which your God tried to control and couldn’t. Originally, he didn’t care, but then in your "new take" you changed that to his lack of control, but never mind, it’s only 0.000001% of failure according to your research into causes of death.

What you fail to see as you criticize the picture of God I present, is the surprisingly great success rate of a living high-speed system in which protein molecules are relied upon to act correctly.

dhw: If I believed in God, I could believe that he was capable of experimenting, of getting new ideas, of enjoying his creations, of deliberately leaving molecules and cells to do their own designing and make their own errors. But I would find it very hard to believe that he would be so incompetent as to try and correct mistakes he couldn’t prevent, fail, and simply leave it to us lesser beings to sort out the mess he had left behind.

DAVID: Your obvious bias is showing. I accept God despite all the warts you invent. Instead of expressing wonder at all He created, you carefully try and describe faults that don't exist in my mind. I didn't realize how narrow your concepts are.

dhw: The warts are your invention, not mine. It is you who have told us that he tried to correct the mistakes but couldn’t, and has left us to do our best. You know perfectly well that I share your wonderment at all the miracles of life, and I cannot see how my openness to such theistic theories as experimentation, having new ideas, enjoying his creations, giving organisms a free hand to do their own designing, make my concepts narrower than your own belief that your sometimes all-powerful God designs everything, produces errors which he can’t control, and faffs around for 3.X billion years directly designing anything but the one species (plus food supply) that he wants to design.

The bold is your total distortion of the points in this discussion I have presented. God does not 'PRODUCE ERRORS'. The problem is they cannot be prevented but can be edited out most of the time. Still your warts. Stick to wonderment with me. The red is your constant humanizing purposes for God we can not validate in any way.