Evolution can’t produce a perfect genome. However, I don’t see why an all powerful and all knowing deity could not produce a perfect genome, especially if that same deity is also in control of the rest of creation that the perfect genome exists in.
If we want to whittle this down to Platonic ideals, could God create the perfect circle or the perfect icosahedron? I would think so.
Of course, i am reminded of the saying that perfect is the enemy of good. And God said, “It is good.”
You find mention of “perfect genome” in various sci-fi horror films. More often than not it is the genome of a monster (one exception being “The Fifth Element”). Is there a connection somehow between “perfect genome” and monstrosity? I think there is. The only way a genome would be perfect is because it is a product of design which means that rather than a living organism what you have is a tool or machine. And if it is made anything like a living organism to fight, kill, and devour, then the most likely tool is a weapon. …a perfect weapon? Seems to me, the only way that could truly be a good thing is if it ceases to be weapon at all. But remaining a weapon, a perfect weapon sounds to me more like a monstrosity. hmmm… how about a weapon that only kills bad people? oops… wouldn’t that be the end of the human race?
God elected to operate within the constraints of the Created universe. In this universe no such thing as a “perfect” genome can exist. We’ve gone over that already - any materially achievable definition winds up in a fatal end condition, a reductio ad absurdum.
Some time back I got into a dispute with someone who maintained that no mutation can happen before it’s “needed”. I couldn’t pin him down on the term “needed”, but also couldn’t get him to see that if there is a sudden change in the environment and three-fifths of a population dies within a year, the two-fifths that survived plainly already had a gene that enabled survival in the new conditions.
This was in connection with my recommendation that before sending humans to Mars we first build a rotating space station that would, among other rings, have a ring such that the rotation would provide Mars-equivalent “spin gravity” to study how human health reacts to Mars gravity. I suggested that it is entirely possible that there are humans among us who already have a gene that would enable them to remain perfectly healthy in that reduced gravity – whereupon the guy said no such mutation could happen until people were already living in Mars gravity, so the space station would be a waste of money.
(grin) the single-gene-dynamic-improvement is much more honored in the breech than the observance. But, yes, “needed” is a blind illusion. Mutations are unpredictable and most of them amount to noise that natural selection filters out.
Which goes to the point that a “perfect genome” is one that has diversity, as even now with climate change we live in a changing environment, and life can survive and adapt so long that some segment of the population has the capacity to thrive in the changes. Some species, of course, will not.
The question that started this thread was what a genome would look like if God chose not to work within those constraints. In other words, what would a perfect genome look like within YEC. That’s the genome I was trying to describe.
Would someone with a perfect genome be capable of sinning? It would seem that the issues of freedom of choice, dualism, and monism would be part of the discussion as well.
Interesting in that when you think about it, the argument that Adam had a perfect genome is not a defense of young earthism and scientific literalism in Genesis, but is really yet another example of how absurd such a thing would be.
Or it might also be like asking “What if all art was perfect - or perfected?” What would the ‘perfect’ painting look like? A painting to end all paintings? The implications (at least as ‘perfection’ is usually conceptualized) is that any deviation from that standard would then be less than perfect. But ‘art’ to end all art would totally miss what art would or could be (or actually is) all about. - and so therefore our alleged ‘perfect’ art could not then be perfect in that sense. So the contradiction reveals itself.
Machines do not sin. They simply do what they are created to do. If they do things which the creator did not intend then that would be a failure of their creator. I suppose someone could intentionally create a machine which did things which were destructive of the machine (I usually define sin as self-destructive habits). But like a bomb, that is simply fulfilling their purpose and I wouldn’t call that a sin. Thus I guess I would suggest the creationist/Deist idea of God as the great watchmaker is incompatible with the Christian concept of sin – not compatible as I understand them anyway.
I would say free will is the very essence of life, because it is a process of self-organization.
Dualism versus monism is more of a matter of explanatory effectiveness. Science has demonstrated the superiority of monism, explaining differences rather than making them fundamental/essential. There are certainly many effective dualisms which can arise in monistic reality. Though I suppose it could also be a matter of alternate ways of looking at things, such as describing the universe in terms of energy or in terms of information. I would call that interdependent dualism where one of the two aspects of reality cannot exist without the other. An older example of this is Aristotle’s hylomorphism.
Forgive the tough love here - YEC folk perform eisegesis when reading Genesis.
In a more colloquial sense, it is pretty common for people to believe that their soul or spirit is independent of their physical body in some way. I don’t think there is a “proper” view in Christianity (could be wrong though) that prescribes the relationship between the spiritual and physical, so there is certainly room for a spectrum of beliefs. I just find it interesting (in a good sense) to see how theology tackles the issue of how our genomes relate to theology.
Genomes arise from a chain of forbears stretching all the way back to a First Cell. Every single element in your (and my) family tree managed to survive and procreate.
Ipso facto those abilities and the deep need to exercise them are paramount.
A theological name for this is original sin.
Perfect genome is an oxymoron. When we ascend from this life, our perfect bodies will have nothing to do with genome, respiration, nutrition, waste, – – –
That is the rational soul of the Greeks and Gnostics, which I don’t believe in. Certainly the evidence doesn’t agree with the idea of a nonphysical puppeteer. I do believe in a non-physical or spiritual aspect to our existence but more as the product of our choices rather than the source of them.
The closest you can find in the Bible is 1 Corinthians 15 regarding resurrection which contrasts descriptions of a physical/natural body with a resurrected spiritual body.
But a good portion went with Neoplatonism instead, and thus accepting some of the more dualistic ideas of the Gnostics.
Yes, I think the spiritual body of the resurrection described in 1 Cor 15 is something with all the power/abilities of our natural body and more. Though I would say these are derived from our choices and desires rather than from chemistry and biology.
As a poster from the late 1960s put it, “Having children is hereditary – if your parents didn’t, you aren’t likely to either”.
Which happens to be a bad name. “Initial sin” is somewhat better; “ancestral sin” was the term (in Greek) till Augustine came along.
I think we were reading Plato at the time; I remember in Greek class drawing a series of the Greek letter “psi” going up the side of my notes, souls leaving their bodies behind.
Depends how you look at the evidence. I personally think of the brain as an interface between hardware and software, akin to the interface in Eden between the physical world and the heavenly world. Thus the “soul”, while not material, isn’t really functional without the body, the hardware, and the body certainly isn’t functional without the “soul”.
Plotinus. I took a course reading his stuff in the original, and our whole class was blown away by how much influence his thinking plainly had over quite a number of the church Fathers, especially in the West, and also later.
Others on this thread have already pointed out that the idea of a “perfect genome” is generally a meaningless concept. That conclusion stems from what it is that a “perfect genome” would describe and specify (i.e. the end product of the genome)
But perhaps there is a more useful perspective of the idea. Since a genome has to first specify a physical context under which it describes anything at all (see The Periodic Table of Elements as a confirmation of this) then I would suggest a “perfect genome” is just that - a genome that successfully specifies it constraints. (i.e. not the end product of the genome, but a state of successful coordination within the genome).
This is a coordinated state that was predicted to exist as early as 1948, and again in 1955, (which was confirmed via experiment in 1956-58). It is the state of successful self-reference which the physicist Howard Pattee uses the word “closure” to describe. The genome first must specify a set of contingent relationships that allow the system to properly process the genome, then it must use that context to specify a dissipative process that can replicate itself. If you change any of the former, it changes all of the latter, thus the simultaneous coordination required for the system to even begin to function.
A “perfect genome” is a sequence of DNA that achieves this state of self-reference and closure.
Sounds like the human mind which is no more non-physical (in the sense of outside or beyond the laws of nature or the things of physics) than the software of a computer.
The body certainly is functional without the mind. We call those vegetative states. Its not a person any more, but the body is functional. But there is absolutely no evidence of anything outside/beyond the laws of nature which the body or mind depends upon for functionality. Not only that but all the evidence shows us that all of the functionality is altered by physical alteration of the brain and we found none of its functionality to be independent of physical state. At most there is the flexibility of software whose operation can be moved to different hardware locations.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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