Theodicy (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, December 05, 2020, 18:20 (1447 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The fault is you describing a God who wants something to watch as if He gets bored. Think about it. Was He bored during the ten billion years from the origin of the universe to the start of life? You are describing a humanized God as usual. God is not a person you can imagine.

dhw: I would imagine that if, as you believe, he set out to design a universe that would contain life, he would have a reason for doing so. In answer to your question, I imagine that far from being bored, he would find the whole process extremely interesting. And I would imagine part of the interest would be finding out what did and didn’t work. And once he’d mastered the art of inventing a living organism that could reproduce and change its structures to create all kinds of life forms, I would imagine he would find that more interesting than just boring old bacteria doing the same things over and over again as he instructs.

Once again you present a vast difference in how you view God as compared to me. First, He don't need interests. He knows exactly what to do, made life easily, just as He made the universe easily. Your usual human God.

dhw: It’s only a theory, but it offers a logical theistic explanation for evolution’s vast and constantly changing bush of life with all its different, unconnected forms and strategies and natural wonders, and it even explains why some life forms found what we consider to be “evil” ways of surviving at the expense of others (the problem of theodicy). Sorry if such interest sounds “human”, but you have agreed that your God probably has thought patterns, emotions etc. similar to ours, and doing something because you are interested in watching the results really doesn’t seem TOO human to be true, does it?

Once again, distortion. I've only agreed to God thinking logically. Stop quoting a different me.

dhw: I offer different explanations of his possible purposes and methods in the context of evolution, all of which you agree are logical, and the fact that they involve thought patterns similar to ours is no reason for rejecting them, so please drop this silly objection.

DAVID: It is about time you accept the concession I have given you. Your reasoning about God is logical if we both assume a very human personality for God. I don't.

dhw: I do accept the concession, and I don’t understand why you keep trying to take it back by moaning that a God who has human thought patterns can't be interested, can't give free rein to his invention, can have a particular goal in mind but can't experiment to get it, or can't learn and get new ideas as he goes along, because those thought patterns are “very human”. Do you know the range of your God's human thought patterns so well that you can reject all of these logical theories?

All these humanizing theories do not fit my concept of who God is personally. We will always disagree about the sort of person God is, recognizing He is a person like no other person..