Theodicy (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 01, 2020, 14:02 (1451 days ago) @ David Turell

The first half of your post simply repeated all the problems dealt with on the “fish to land” thread, which has now turned into a repetition of "David’s Theory of Evolution"! I have edited accordingly.

DAVID: Of course God directly designed all advances in evolution. That is how designed evolution can give the appearance of a natural process.

dhw: By “natural”, you usually mean without God’s intervention, but it never occurs to you that the appearance of a natural process might be due to the process being “natural” once your God had set it up to proceed without his intervention.

DAVID: Each new complexity is too complicated for secondhand design mechanisms.

I can accept that argument for the complexity of the cells themselves, but not for the products of cellular cooperation and restructuring, which is what produces each new complexity. You are happy to label your God as being possibly “incapable” of directly designing H. sapiens, and the implication of the above objection is that you regard him as also being incapable of inventing a mechanism that can restructure itself in response to new conditions. I seem to have more respect for your God’s powers than you do.

DAVID: I have explained theodicy as our lack of discovery of God's purposes, at which we continue our research.

dhw: Your explanation of God’s creation of evil (he deliberately designed the bad bugs) is that we don’t yet know why he did it. I’m sorry, but I can’t regard “I don’t know” as an explanation, let alone as a valid justification for rejecting theories which you yourself accept as being logical.

DAVID: Your theories about God are logical if you begin from a position of describing God as very human. I never do.

dhw: What is this “very human” you keep trotting out? You are sure God watches his creations with interest.

DAVID: I've said over and over I'm not sure.

This is partly what makes our discussions so difficult. You make unambiguous statements, the implications of which I try to examine, and then you try to withdraw them.
Sunday, October 18, 2020, 19:07
dhw: Do you think your God is watching or not?
DAVID: I'm sure He sees what is going on with His own level of interest, unknown to us.

Followed on October 21 2020 7.28 by Sunday, October 18, 2020, 19:07 by:
DAVID: “I certainly think he is interested in His creations, but not as entertainment.”

It is only when I pointed out that this could denote his motive for creating a free-rein evolution including bad bugs that you decided not to be sure or certain.

dhw: I have suggested that if he exists, he created his creations so that there would be something interesting for him to watch. Why is your interested God not “very human” and my interested God is? And what is wrong with your own proposal that your God probably has human-type thought patterns, emotions etc.? That is perfectly feasible since you believe that he created life out of himself as “first cause”.

DAVID: Why do you invent my thoughts which do not exist?

Same again. These are direct quotes (I’ll look up the dates if you don’t believe me): “He and we probably have similar thought patterns and emotions beyond just simple logical thought”, God “very well could think like us”, and “we only know his logic is like ours”. You only start to challenge your own perfectly reasonable assumptions when I use them against your absurd “humanizing” objections to my own theories.
In the meantime, you still haven’t offered any logical reason for rejecting the theory that your God may have given evolution a free rein so that all life forms would provide him with an ever-changing focus of interest. All forms seek their own means of survival, bad bugs are only bad from our viewpoint, and humans are no doubt the most interesting of all the life forms (our free will mirroring the freedom of all forms to follow their own paths). It’s only a theory, but it explains the bush of evolution and solves the problem of theodicy.