Theodicy (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, November 22, 2020, 11:44 (1213 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I'll stick with my belief God is in charge of creating history, and accepted history has no errors.

dhw: The errors in the above exchange refer to your theory of evolution being wrong, not to history having no errors! In any case, according to you, your God designed a system in which errors were unavoidable. I have opposed that with my theory that what you called errors were NOT errors. So you’ve got it wrong with both references.'

DAVID: Telling me I'm wrong proves nothing.

I proposed that there was something wrong with your theory of evolution, and you mistakenly took your theory for history. In any case, according to you there WERE errors in history – namely, those that your God could not prevent, even though he tried.

dhw: I don’t [know] what constitutes the logic in your belief that he deliberately designed the bad bugs and we don’t know why.

DAVID: The logic is we don't know why as yet.

That is the strangest example of logic that I have ever seen.

DAVID: [re dhw’s possible solution to the problem of theodicy]: It is perfectly logical if you are considering a very humanized God.

dhw: Back to square one. You are sure that your God is interested in his creations, so that’s OK. But if I say that maybe interest was his reason for creating his creations, suddenly that’s VERY humanized and not acceptable, even though God probably has thought patterns etc. similar to ours.

DAVID: Again your twisted interpretation of my thoughts. Only logical thought patterns!!!

Here is an example of logic: you are sure that God is interested in his creations. Therefore it is possible that he created them because he wanted something he could be interested in. Why can’t this be called a “logical thought pattern”? Besides, you also explicitly included emotions in your original agreement, and another of your statements was that God “very well could think like us”. And in any case “His logic is like ours” makes no sense if we can’t understand his logic!

DAVID: In my view, as you know, God is very purposeful and keeps tight control over all the processes He creates.

dhw: In my view, if God exists, he is purposeful, very purposeful, extremely purposeful, as purposeful as a purposeful God can possibly be. Satisfied? But his purpose may have been to give free rein to what he creates... [see above and below re "interest"]

DAVID: If by free-for-all you mean unguided evolution, I don't think so. Your very purposeful God would have specific goals, such as our unwarranted, unexpected arrival as based on a weak theory of Darwin survivability. All per Adler's reasoning. Only a purposeful designer can make humans appear.

According to you, only a purposeful designer could make EVERY species and natural wonder in life’s history appear. Why must my very purposeful God only want one specific species to appear if he deliberately set out to create an unpredictable variety of species that would come and go so that he wouldn’t end up with what you call a “dull Garden of Eden”? Nothing much of interest there. The free-for-all principle is in fact exemplified by us humans: just as it has produced bad bugs in Nature, it has produced good and evil in humans, no doubt the most interesting of all species.


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