Theodicy (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, November 12, 2020, 17:40 (1470 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: 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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Same humanizing try. No.

dhw: You have already demolished your own “humanizing objection” over and over again by agreeing that he probably has thought patterns and attributes similar to ours, and your certainty that your God watches us with interest makes this objection doubly irrelevant. If he watches us with interest, why do you find it illogical that he might have created us because he wanted to create something that he could watch with interest?

My view of God is that He does not create to have something interesting to watch. Michelangelo did not create David to sit and watch the statue with interest. God is in the business of creating what He wants to create with any interest coming as a secondary event.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: So you have bad bugs developing on autopilot. That is always a possibility when a self-design system is present. I feel God wants more control than that as I have always stated.

dhw: Thank you for acknowledging the possibility that my theory is correct. The fact that you have a feeling does not provide a logical reason for rejecting the theory.

We each interpret God's personality totally differently.