Theodicy (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, December 06, 2020, 15:48 (1231 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: 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: Even if he made life easily, how does that come to mean that he wasn’t interested in the process of making life and the product of the process? You go on and on about your God being purposeful, and complaining that my own theories are not purposeful. Two questions for you: 1) what do you think was your purposeful God’s purpose in creating life?

He didn't tell me. Considering how complex it is, it is quite an accomplishment. Perhaps with our consciousness, it has been proposed by Davies He wanted us to recognize Him and research and understand His works..

2) dhw: What do you think was your God’s purpose in creating bad bugs (i.e. give us your solution to the problem of “theodicy”)? So far your answer to 1) has been “to create H. sapiens”. This is only one third of an answer, because your purposeful God must have had a purpose in creating H. sapiens plus food supply, and he must have had a purpose in creating all the organisms and food supplies that had no connection with H. sapiens. And the answer to 2) is you don’t know. I’m surprised you haven’t yet argued that doing something with a purpose is too “human”!

My answer has been given. They have a God's purpose we still do not understand. It is our interpretation they are bad. They may have an important undiscovered purpose.

dhw: I offer different explanations of his possible purposes and methods in the context of evolution [and theodicy], 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?

DAVID: 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.

dhw: The very proposal that he is a person like no other person suggests that he is a person, i.e. that he has personality, attributes, or as you so aptly put it: thought patterns and emotions similar to ours. But of course if he exists, he is not a two-legged, white-bearded, ageing, ultimately dying lump of flesh like us, and he has vast powers that we can never aspire to having. But it would be interesting if once and for all you would tell us exactly what IS your concept of God “personally”.

I'll repeat for the umpteenth time: He is highly purposeful and creates nothing for His own self-interest or pleasure. He is solely in the business of creation. I'm sure He likes what He creates, and that is He is satisfied in His results as the inventor. But none of this is at a human level of understanding, since we are forced to use human words and meanings in describing Him. He is beyond really understanding or describing.