Theodicy (Introduction)

by David Turell @, Thursday, October 08, 2020, 18:12 (1257 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Today’s article on "Molecular machines seen clearly" does indeed help us to see clearly the consequences of these mistakes, which in your posts on God’s error corrections you dismissed as "minimal":

QUOTE: "'Malfunctions in these molecular machines contribute to diseases such as osteoporosis, neurodegeneration, diabetes, cancer and AIDS [...]

Minimal in the sense that the many trillions of reactions work perfectly, and God anticipated mistakes with editing systems. The system we have is the only one that will work.


DAVID: Namby-pamby refers to underlying personality, not logical choice of giving us the brains to work on back-up when God recognized unexpected mistakes will get by the editing systems during our lives.

dhw: How about: God didn’t design them, but wanted to avoid the dull predictability of a Garden of Eden, and therefore invented a system whereby living organisms would design themselves in an endless variety of forms, all of which would find different ways (which we judge to be good or bad) of surviving in the on-going process we know as evolution?

DAVID: Again you wish for out of control evolution which might luckily reach our forms.

dhw: Please don’t switch the subject, which is theodicy. Does the proposal above provide an explanation of good and evil or not?

An possible explanation I don't accept, based on my view of God's personality.


DAVID: Evil among humans beings is explained because God gave us free will.

dhw: Just as in the above proposal he would have given organisms “free will” to find their own methods of survival.

With 'free will' evolution it would be directionless.


dhw: My proposal is that God did not want dull perfection, but an unpredictable, ever changing bush of life as all organisms tried to find their own ways (good or bad) to survive.
dhw: So it’s back to your inevitable “errors” theory, in which it’s not God’s fault if the only system he could devise entailed “bad” errors and “bad” environmental conditions. He was incapable of creating a system without harmful or bad or evil effects.

Not incapable. Impossible with the speed of reactions involving 'free' molecules to create life.


DAVID: You have simply repeated describing a soft purposeless God who gives up control.

dhw: The only purpose you have offered us is that your God created his error-prone system, designed bad viruses and bacteria, and presumably (since he never gives up control) designed all the natural disasters, in order to directly design H. sapiens, whom he did not wish to harm (at least he has a soft heart, then). You consider a God who creates a life system of endless and ever-changing variety, with all the interplay between good and bad, light and dark, and all the unpredictability that would be the exact opposite of a dull Garden of Eden, to be soft and purposeless. So please tell us why you think he deliberately created bad viruses and bacteria, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes in spite of his soft-heartedness (which I hope he would also feel towards other organisms than ourselves, since the our fellow animals also know what it is to suffer). If you can’t think of a reason, once more please tell us why my proposal is not feasible. And please accept that a test of feasibility is not whether or not it matches your own subjective concept of God and his purposes and nature.

You blithely ignore all the facts presented about the perfect planet presented here at length. I won't repeat them. Your view of Him is obviously soft and highly humanized. It is feasible only if your soft God is the real God. So we reach agreement. Your God is not my God by a very wide margin.


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