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

by dhw, Saturday, September 05, 2020, 10:49 (1330 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God's incompetence is your interpretation in bold, certainly not mine.

dhw: A God who created a system that produces errors, does his best to correct them, sometimes fails and leaves it to us to do what he could not do, seems to me to be incompetent.

DAVID: The system is an electro-physical-chemical process in soup. Negative ions look for positive ions to achieve a quiet neutral state and the result is folding, a change in 3-D molecular shape which produces function/s. It is an amazing mechanism. Think if it. Shape produces function!!! Shape carries information!! God provides mitigation but not all editing is perfect, any more than regular living function is perfect. I am in awe of what living biochemistry accomplishes. But I've been trained in biochemistry and physical chemistry. I've raised the error issue because I knew it had to be addressed for completeness.

And after making a complete hash of evolutionary “errors”, you are now telling me to forget about disease-causing “errors” and concentrate on your God’s successes. I share your awe at what living biochemistry accomplishes, but it gets us nowhere in your quest to explain the “errors”. I have offered you an explanation.

dhw: I have proposed that the system he designed, complete with so-called “errors”, is precisely the system he wanted to design, giving molecules the freedom to do their own designing, attacking and defending.

DAVID: The red colored sentence is not what molecules do. They are under God's instructions for their actions.

dhw: But they are free to make "mistakes"! You keep telling us that your God can’t prevent them from doing so! The difference between us is that you say it’s not his fault and, in the case of disease-producing errors, he does his best to correct them. I propose that he deliberately gave them their freedom, and indeed that is what has led to the vast variety of life’s bushes (evolutionary "errors") and also to the required phenomenon of death (disease-causing "errors").

DAVID: The bold is wrong, in my view. God could not have control under the system He created, and we do not know if any other system is available for use in life. My thought is God used the only system He could create, since He is the created of reality. And again you ignore the point that most aging is built in necessarily.

You are once again harping on your God’s lack of control, whereas in the past your God has always been in control of everything. If your God could not prevent molecules from disobeying his instructions, then they were free to disobey his instructions and do their own designing, defending and attacking! Either he did or he didn’t want that to happen. And you are right, we don’t know if another system is possible, so why do you assume your all-powerful God couldn’t have created one? I’m not saying my proposal is right – I don’t know the truth any more than you do. But I look for an explanation that makes sense. Why doesn’t my proposal make sense? It incorporates ageing and death – all in keeping with what God WANTED to create, instead of your proposal that he wanted ageing and death but didn’t want all the nasty “errors” which he tried to correct but in many cases couldn’t, and therefore left to us to do what he couldn’t do.

dhw: I have explained above why I think your interpretation is disrespectful: you assume that God tried and failed to correct some of the disease-causing errors in the system he designed. The alternative I offer is that he designed what he wanted to design. Far more respectful.

DAVID: My only problem is your misinterpretation of my presentation of living biochemistry. I am fine about God's efforts since I fully understand the problems.

I fully accept your presentation of living biology. I do not accept your muddled explanation of the evolutionary errors or your non-explanation of the disease-causing errors, which you now want me to ignore.

Under “Biological complexity: removing cellular garbage”

DAVID: The system had to be in place with the appearance of the first cells, for continuous garbage accumulation would lead to cell death. Only design fits. This thought applies to origin of life. The very first cells that lived had to have a garbage system as an integral part of the cell. And obviously this is a very important part of God's error control editing system.

I think you should drop this whole concept of “error”, which is thoroughly misleading. According to your original theory, “errors” were mistakes which could not be prevented. You got into a complete tangle over evolutionary “errors”, and you are still in a tangle over disease-causing “errors”, which also “lead to cell death” – but you don’t even want to talk about them any more. Now all of a sudden we have a new category: garbage. Why do you regard the removal of unnecessary matter as editing a mistake? Shrinkage of the brain entails getting rid of unnecessary cells. Were they a mistake? You even support the theory that the whole of evolution is based on discarding unnecessary genes. So if God’s only purpose was to design H. sapiens plus food supply, were all the preceding and now extinct life forms and food supplies an “error”?