Return to David's theory of evolution, purpose & theodicy (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, April 28, 2024, 09:28 (14 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy and boredom

dhw: According to your boredom theory, your omniscient God allowed us to commit evil and knew what we would do, and is to be blamed for designing bugs that would kill us, but was morally justified in doing so because it alleviated boredom. “Unfortunate”? Who for? You tell us that it is good and morally justified, because it alleviates his and our boredom.

DAVID: Don't apply to me your distortions of God. My God is never bored, a human emotion, you, as usual, apply to God.

dhw: (two weeks ago) I’m sure you’ll agree that your God , who you believe is interested in his creations, would find puppets boring.

DAVID: Exactly.

dhw: And so according to you, he allowed/created evil in order to relieve boredom. For himself and for us.

DAVID: No!!! I can't imagine God wanting puppets. He gave us free will instead. Stop distortions! My God does not get bored. No Garden of Eden, but a challenging life makes more sense.

He would not want puppets because he would find them boring. “Exactly,” you said. And so he gave us free will, knowing that we would use it to rape, murder, slaughter etc. As we have agreed, it is perfectly possible to lead an interesting. “challenging” life without evil. So why would an all-good God want to create the bugs for which you blame him or to allow human evil?

dhw: […]And this is the God you tell us is selfless and without self-interest.

DAVID: God has no self-interest and does not have a personality trait of boredom. Stop humanizing Him. When will you ever learn how to really think out Him?

dhw: When will you ever learn to stop contradicting yourself? Earlier you wrote: ”There are no established standards for who God is.” How then can you possibly announce that he has no self-interest or boredom, when you’ve just proposed, championed and claimed moral justification for the theory that your God allowed/created evil to alleviate boredom.

Under "Giant viruses"

DAVID: It is your cockamamy view of evolution that is at fault. All species produced were relevant in their time.

dhw: Relevant to what? Certainly not to what you believe to have been your God’s one and only purpose (us and our food), since only 0.1% of them led to us and our food.

DAVID: Relevant to current ecosystems of the time in evolution.

dhw: [..] Thank you for confirming their irrelevance to the present, which is the reason why your theory of evolution is so illogical.

DAVID: This is where your maths about evolution are so confused: The 0.1% surviving COULD NOT be here without the preceding 99.9% having lived!!! Stop the irrationality of your dodge.
And:
DAVID: All extinction led to current new living forms.

But the 0.1% are the lines of organisms that led to us and our food. Read what you wrote:
dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

dhw: If we plus food are not descended from the 99.9%, how can they have led to us plus food? We used the dinosaurs as our obvious example: only birds descended from them. The rest were dead ends.

DAVID: Dead ends were Raup's extinctions. All leading to today's huge complex bush of life.

The extinct species preceded today’s bush, but how can all extinct species have led to today’s bush if today’s bush is only descended from 0.1% of them?

Transferred from “More Miscellany”

dhw: You have just agreed that your faith in your choices (apart from the design theory) is irrational (i.e. not logical).

DAVID: The thoughts are logical. The final leap is not.

dhw: That depends on which of your choices we’re talking about. […]

DAVID: Your weird distortion of my theology is not worth discussing, as totally preposterous.

dhw: Please tell us which part of the [..] theory is a distortion. To be precise: do you now reject your beliefs that (1) we and our food were your God’s sole purpose, 2) that he chose to design and cull 99.9% of past species, 3) that we and our food are descended from only 0.1% of past species, which means the remaining 99.9% were irrelevant to his purpose?

DAVID: Your invented discussion of the statistics of survival in evolution is wildly illogical.

dhw: It is precisely what you agreed to. 99.9% did not lead to us or our food. (See above.) There are no distortions, and your denial of your own theories is “totally preposterous”.

DAVID: No, once again, the 0.1% currently surviving came from the 99.9% as their ancestors.

See above. I note that you can’t find any other supposed “weird distortion” of your theories.