Theodicy (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, October 19, 2020, 19:46 (1494 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

Yes, by definition we create a spectacle. But you mean God expects it to entertain Him, and that is not the way I think God would view it. Per Adler, God's interest is us is a 50/50 proposition.

dhw: Now please tell us why YOU think your God created or allowed evil.

All I am left with for the enth time is to state: to make life interesting as far as bad bugs are concerned, and providentially gave us the brains to overcome them. At the same time those brains have free will, and we create our own evil God cannot stop.

dhw: 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?

No it isn't. I'm back to God has reasons we have not yet discovered, if we can.

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.

dhw: 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.

Bypassed the point as usual. God's reasons for His deeds are not known to us, and your preferred guesses are purely humanizing. Just accept God as purposeful.

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.

dhw: 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.

Same silly approach by chopping up evolution into discontinuous events. The God which you have accepted in the bold is our image of God, not mine, and is the basis of our distinct disagreement about Him. Your image of God would not recognize my image of God.