Theodicy (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, November 14, 2020, 11:50 (1468 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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: I know that is your view. Now please give me a logical reason why my proposal is not feasible. Michelangelo would have died of boredom if he had sat watching his statue for the rest of eternity. Do you never wonder what your God would have felt like if for eternity he had had nothing to do but think about himself? (And before you start muttering “humanization”, please remember your firmly expressed opinion that your God probably has thought patterns, emotions and other attributes similar to ours.)

DAVID: Again you want God to act like a human. My thought patterns for God refer to logic, no more. I don't know if He has emotions like ours, if at all. And I don't know if He cares about us. Why do I have to repeat this over and over???

Nobody knows his nature (or even if he exists), which is why we offer different theories. The question is simply how feasible these might be. If you didn’t want possible explanations for the existence of evil in a world you think your God directly designed, then why did you raise the subject? You have said repeatedly that your God “very well could think like us”, so how do you know he doesn’t?

dhw: You have no idea of the intention behind his direct design of most extinct life forms and econiches, since they don’t fit in with your belief that every life form was part of the goal of directly designing humans, and you have no idea of the intention behind your God’s direct design of bad bugs. And you have yet to come up with a single logical objection to my theory other than the fact that it doesn’t fit in with your personal view of God.

DAVID: My only thought about the bad bugs is they have a reason we do not yet, and may never understand. And we have the brains to handle them over time.

Our having the brains to handle them does not explain why– according to you – your God designed them in the first place. I have proposed that he didn’t design them. And you still haven’t come up with any logical reason for rejecting that proposal and the rest of my theory.