Theodicy (Introduction)

by David Turell @, Friday, October 23, 2020, 17:37 (1242 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Friday, October 23, 2020, 17:58

DAVID: You used 'spectacle', which implies entertainment.

dhw: I will take the definition “a strange or interesting object or phenomenon” (Encarta). Now please answer my question.

Neat trick, trying to limit meaning! My thesaurus has four prime senses of the word: appearance, prodigy, show and drama. Thus entertainment fits!!!

DAVID: You still don't understand the biology of life as designed by God as I view it. The bold is not a fault but a requirement for free molecules in the soup of life. Your God gives freedom to life to do what it wants. I see it as under very tight controls from a very purposeful God.

dhw: Thank you for the comment I have bolded. That is my own theory. No “fault”, no accidental, unavoidable errors which he is unable to correct (pretty disparaging, I’d say), but “free molecules” which do what they want. Not tight controls, but a mechanism that would use its freedom to create the vast variety of life forms and of goodies and baddies that make up the history of evolution. In other words, precisely the world we know – created that way by a “very purposeful God” (if he exists).

Again a free-for-all evolution. How does concise design happen? You're illogically back to chance, which even you have given it short shrift. You still don't understand the importance of protein folding which creates function at very high speed to have life emerge.

X
Under “error corrections III and IV”:

QUOTE: "If a mismatched base pair, bound strongly by a transcription factor, makes it through the DNA replication cycle without being repaired by another type of protein—known as a repair enzyme—it can become a mutation, and mutations can lead to genetic diseases like cancer and neurodegeneration. (DAVID’s bold)

DAVID: […] This study shows the complexity of mistake controls designed by God.

dhw: And every case of cancer and neurodegeneration shows that the repair mechanisms don’t always work. God’s incompetence? Surely not. "What God wants, God gets. "God gave us exactly the system/reality He wanted" (D. Turell)

DAVID: Exactly.

dhw: We agree: the system which produced all the goodies and the baddies was the system he wanted, as described above. And the icing on the cake is that you are “sure that He sees what is going on with His own level of interest”. Which opens the door to the possibility that he created life so that he could see something that would interest him.

Of course an inventor is interested in his creations. God is more interested in His accomplishing purposeful creations on the way to his goals, a great difference from your view of desiring spectacle. Stop humanizing Him.


DAVID (under “God’s error corrections IV”): Just presenting another example of God providing a check on DNA errors and making them actually useful! So not all errors are only bad as dhw, in denigrating God, is wont to write. God gave us the best living system He could.

dhw: There is no denigration of God in my arguments. It is you who have drawn our attention to errors which are NOT useful – namely those that cause disease – and it is you who denigrate him by telling us that he was unable to control them but provided backups which sometimes didn’t work and so he left it to humans to correct what he couldn’t correct. Even “the best he could” is a denigration, as if he was powerless to do otherwise. I have him creating precisely what he wanted to create, and in so doing I offer a solution to the problem of theodicy.

I have not denigrated God in any way except in your twisted version of what I present. He created exactly what He needed to create, knowing and planning for the problems. Not your emphasis on 'bad' God. No other system would work, a point you don't understand.


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