Theodicy (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 11, 2020, 10:59 (1471 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Please note God as a designer naturally wants to do the best job He can in design. Your so-called kindness is again your humanizing version of God.

dhw: So now you have him directly designing every organism, being interested in every organism, providing backups (which sometimes fail) to correct the errors in his design, but only doing so because he is a perfectionist who doesn’t like mistakes. He doesn’t care about the suffering. Just the sort of human we all detest.

DAVID: Again you guess. We don't know if He cares about our sufferings, but religions tell us He does. I'll stick with Adler's 50/50.

Of course it’s all guesses! Nobody has solved the theodicy problem, and that is why we come up with different theories. God not caring about our sufferings is one possibility.

DAVID: He is interested as an inventor would be, but not for spectacle or entertainment.

dhw: I have already said that I am happy for those two "frivolous" terms to disappear from the argument, and to stick to your word “interest”. If he is interested as a human inventor would be, why is it out of the question that he invented life because he wanted something that he could be interested in?

DAVID: Same old problem for you. He is NOT a human inventor. His reasons for His creations are unknown to us but I fully believe not for a primary purpose of making something to create entertaining interest for Him.

It was you who drew the analogy between him and a human inventor. I never used the “frivolous” word "entertaining", and you should drop it. You have said you are sure that he is interested in us. If so, why are you sure that he could not have created life in order to have something he could be interested in?

dhw: ...if God exists, I propose that he designed the mechanism that enables ALL life forms to design their own ways of surviving. And he did so because he was interested in the products of his invention. One theory to explain the whole of evolution AND theodicy. What are the logical flaws?

DAVID: Yes, God made the bad bugs and He gave organisms the ability to adapt within the limits of their own species attributes to handle problems that crop up. No flaws, but it doesn't explain the bad bug purpose. My answer is some day we will scientifically discover why.

In my (theistic) theory, he did NOT make the bad bugs but only the original cells from which they descended. And they designed their own modes of survival just as the good bugs and every other organism did, using their perhaps God-given form of intelligence. Survival was their purpose, and God’s purpose was to create a self-designing system that would be an endless source of interest to him, though we can’t know his thoughts as he watches us with interest.