Back to theodicy and David's theories (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Wednesday, February 03, 2021, 10:45 (1387 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Total use of comments out of context. I accept what God does/did as history and the only thing I have 'no idea about' is why He chose to evolve. Humans were evolved, pure fact.

dhw: But (a) by evolve, you mean directly design, and (b) why did he directly design millions of life forms that had no connection with humans, if his one and only goal was to “evolve” (= directly design) humans? If you have suddenly come up with an explanation, do please tell us.

DAVID: The obvious connection is food supply provided by the bush of life. Why must I repeat?

dhw: […] in your own words: “The current bush of food is NOW for humans NOW.There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms”

DAVID: Your usual twisted quote out of context.

It is not a twisted quote, and there is no other possible context, and it is as obvious a truth as you can get. The current bush of food is not the bush of food for organisms that existed and disappeared millions of years ago!

dhw: The interconnection lies in the fact that all forms branched out from the same root (bacteria), but how does that come to mean that the 99% of forms which had no connection with humans were “part of the goal of evolving humans”?

DAVID: Again, food supply for now, supplied by the whole bush of ecosystems.

3.X billion years’ worth of past ecosystems did not supply the food supply for now! Hence your other quote: “Extinct life has no role in current time”. Your two quotes together make perfect sense, so I really don’t know why you are trying to dissociate yourself from them.

Protein folding creates life

DAVID: Your free-for-all does not fit my view of a purposeful God. You never comment on the biological necessity for the living system we have which has to allow molecules to make mistakes for the sake of speed. All you do is snipe and complain.

dhw: […] I accept that the high speed system your God designed inevitably leads to what you call “mistakes”, and I agree that life is miraculously wonderful. My problem is that you raised the question of the “errors” that cause diseases like diabetes and Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s and MND, and this led to a discussion on why he directly designed bad bacteria and bad viruses, and to the problem of theodicy. And with my theist hat on, I try to answer the questions you raised, but you want me to forget them.

DAVID: I never asked you to forget, but reasonably study the problem instead of sniping at God's efforts.

I am reasonably studying the problems which you raised of why your God was incapable of finding cures for the diseases which his system had created (to which you can now add the harmful retrogenes from another thread), and why he directly designed bad bacteria and viruses, and your response is that it wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t cure the diseases, and one day someone will tell us why the bad bacteria and viruses are in fact good. I am not sniping. On the contrary, I have offered an explanation which removes all the responsibility implied and then abandoned by your approach. And your only objection is that it gives your God a feature in common with humans, even though you agree that your God probably has thought patterns and emotions similar to ours.

DAVID: Of course He would be interested in the results of His creations, but they were not primarily created just to be interesting, a very humanizing interpretation.

dhw: Then please tell us at long last what you think was his primary goal in creating life, including humans.

DAVID: I know His goal was the eventual production of humans. We all can guess at why. I don't believe He's directly told us.

He has not directly told us anything (assuming he exists), so how do you “know” we were his goal right from the start, and how do you know he directly designed every life form, and why, if his goal was us, did he directly design all the dead species and food supplies that had no connection with us?

DAVID: I have no idea why He chose evolution to produce us. It is not important to me, as it seems to you. You don't accept we were a goal.

“A” goal again! What were the other goals? If your only problem is to explain why he didn’t directly create humans instead of evolving them, you must have a good explanation for his direct design of millions of life forms that had no connection with humans, but all you’ve come up with is that these extinct life forms, which had no connection with humans and died out millions of years before humans arrived on the scene, were part of our food supply. You yourself have recognized that this is nonsense – see the two quotes above. You have a fixed belief, you can’t find a logical explanation to justify it, but nothing will shake you out of it. That was the conclusion reached weeks ago, and we agreed to leave it at that. So please leave it at that.