Theodicy (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 02, 2020, 12:35 (1203 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: You don't seem to realize the complex instructions that must be given aforehand to the cells genome to create the cellular cooperation and production. They can use epigenetics for minor adaptations but not anything more.

The instructions to cells to create cellular cooperation and production are what – in my theistic version – I call God’s design of cellular intelligence. The very fact that cells can create minor adaptations without your God’s intervention proves that there is an autonomous mechanism for change. It is often difficult to draw a borderline between adaptation and innovation (e.g. legs for land evolving into fins for water). Nobody can explain speciation, and so – like your own God-does-it-all – we only have theories. Some are more logical than others.

dhw: You are sure God watches his creations with interest.

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

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Your invention of my changing my mind. Those statements of mine are consistent. To repeat, He may have a degree of interest, amount we cannot gauge. I really doubt a serious God does it for entertainment, your constant humanizing approach, with a God who invents free-rein evolution. I won't give an inch on your constant humanizing, which you seem not to even recognize.

Zero interest would mean he is not interested. You are sure and certain that he is interested. “Entertainment” was your own choice of word, and I asked you to stick to "interest" as a more neutral term, to avoid such superficiality. “Constant humanizing” has you once more ignoring your own perfectly reasonable assumption that your God probably has thought patterns etc. similar to our own. Far from not recognizing it, I have explained that I find it perfectly logical that a “first cause” God would create beings with attributes similar to his own.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Same old, same old. I view God in total control of His strict purposes, and every thing tha That thought cannot be foreign to you.

Something has been omitted here, but your interpretation of your God’s purpose and actions does not provide one single logical reason for rejecting my theory!


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