Theodicy (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 21, 2020, 10:30 (1245 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Spectacle implies spectators are watching. And the usual reason is entertainment for the spectators. Yes, I agree God watches out of interest viewing his creations but I don't think He feels entertained. I don't think He created anything out a desire 'so that he could have something interesting to watch' to use your exact humanizing phrase.

You are really scraping the barrel. Forget my word “spectacle” and your word “entertain”, and look at what you have written yourself. You agree that he “watches out of interest”, but you don’t agree that he created what he created “so that he could have something interesting to watch.” Bearing in mind your own agreement that the brontosaurus is NOT directly connected to H. sapiens, do you think he directly designed the brontosaurus and said to himself: “I've directly designed the brontosaurus as part of my goal of directly designing H. sapiens, though there’s no direct connection, but I’ll watch it for a few million years because it’s interesting”?

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

DAVID: All I am left with for the enth time is to state: to make life interesting as far as bad bugs are concerned….

dhw: To make life interesting for whom?

DAVID: Obviously as you and I have stated previously, us! Not Him which is your idea.

dhw: But bad bugs existed long before humans. Why do you think that your God spent 3.X billion years designing bad bugs, meat-eating monsters, murderous parasites before he produced us with our brains to overcome them?

DAVID: You same silly comment: He chose to evolve us over the time it took.

But if he designed all the bad bugs, meat-eating monsters and murderous parasites before we were here, how could they have made life more interesting for US? Similar problem to his interest in the brontosaurus.

DAVID: At the same time those brains have free will, and we create our own evil God cannot stop.

dhw: And I suggest that much of our own evil evolved from the manner in which earlier organisms infected, exploited, killed and ate their fellow organisms in pursuit of their own survival. The root of most evil is selfishness. That is not a criticism of our fellow organisms who have to be selfish in order to survive. I am merely pointing out the roots of evil which lie in the system your God designed. As you say, it makes life more interesting for him than a Garden of Eden, which would explain why he designed the system the way it is. No accidents, no inability to prevent evil – simply a God who knows what he wants and designs the system that will produce what he wants. Just a theory, but is there anything in it that contradicts the history of life as we know it?

DAVID: No, God gave us exactly the system/reality He wanted and the only system of living organisms He could produce required by the necessary biochemical speed of reactions, which includes His design of giant molecule enzymes to make sure the speed exists.

Why do you say no? We agree that he gave us the system/reality he wanted! I am not disputing “the necessary biological speed”. I am suggesting that he wanted all the errors and the bugs and meat-eating monsters and parasites whose “selfish” behaviour is mirrored in most forms of evil. And this in turn makes life more interesting than a dull Garden of Eden.


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