Theodicy (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 19, 2020, 14:15 (1494 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Totally humanized view of a spectating God. I still believe that God presented challenges for a more interesting life than in Eden. We've got the brains for it.

dhw: More interesting for whom? Do you think your God is watching or not?

DAVID: I'm sure He sees what is going on with His own level of interest, unknown to us.

If you are sure that he sees it, you must be sure that he is watching it, and if he is watching it and doing nothing, it is a spectacle.

DAVID: Part of the equation is human ability to be evil through free will actions.

dhw: I don’t know what equation you’re referring to. Why don’t you use the word spectacle? What other reason can you think of for your God creating or allowing evil?

DAVID: You want the spectacle for your humanized God.

I know what I am proposing. Now please tell us why YOU think your God created or allowed evil.

dhw: Do you think your God designed the bad bugs to play a beneficial role in the ecosystems of life? At least your previous theory made a bit more sense (see above, on “challenge”).

DAVID: They may well play a beneficial role we do not yet understand through research.

So your God deliberately designed bad bugs, which he knew would harm us, because they also do good, but we don’t know how. Not a very illuminating answer to the problem of theodicy, is it?

dhw: You have agreed that free will provides plenty of spectacle. What is wrong with the idea that God wanted to create plenty of spectacle? All you can come up with is “weak” and “humanizing”, the first of which is a meaningless judgement and the second of which is countered by your perfectly logical conclusion that a God who creates a being with certain thought patterns, emotions and other attributes probably has thought patterns, emotions and other attributes similar to ours.

DAVID: You are correct. Our ability to think, construct concepts, plan is mirrored in the way God's mind works. But that does not mean our thoughts can directly know the reasons God has for his purposes.

Of course nobody knows. But your agreement is enough to obliterate the silly argument that any theory which humanizes God must be wrong. So please drop it. The rest of your post is the usual attempt to gloss over the illogicality of your theory of evolution, as dealt with under “error correction”, by telling us how special humans are (agreed), and reiterating that I reject God’s choice to evolve us,i.e. ignoring the fact that evolved for you = directly design, and if God exists you believe he also directly designed millions of extinct life forms and econiches which you agree had nothing to do with humans.

DAVID: I have perfectly logical reasons for my views of carefully seeing God as fully purposeful in reaching the goals that history demonstrates, and going no further, which you love to guess at, with no supporting facts.

My alternative theistic explanations of evolution all point to a purposeful God, history does not demonstrate goals but demonstrates the results of evolution, i.e. billions of years’ worth of life forms, the latest of which is humans. “Goals” are a human interpretation of the facts. It is you who go further than what history demonstrates by insisting not only that there is a God (though I have accepted that premise for the sake of our discussion) but also you KNOW his purpose (us), you know he directly designed every life form including us, and you know that every other life form was “part of the goal of evolving humans” although there is no connection between the extinct forms and ourselves.