Theodicy: solution lies in definition of God (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, October 03, 2021, 08:47 (898 days ago) @ David Turell

Irreducibly complex controls
DAVID: God edited His system, but free-to-change-shape molecules can make uncontrollable mistakes.

dhw: Which of course limits his powers.

DAVID: Which He accepted to produce life.

dhw: So God, your all-powerful “first cause”, accepted the limitations he had created for himself. Whereas my suggestion has him creating precisely what he wanted to create. And yet later you call such a God “strange”.

DAVID: I am in complete agreement with you. God created the system He wanted to create, with the difference, He knew is would cause uncontrollable mistakes and so added editing to control it enough to allow life to appear and evolve under His guidance to reach His goals.

Your proposal is that he was incapable of producing any other system, and he did his best (not always successfully – hence all the suffering) to control the “uncontrollable mistakes”. My proposal is that (if he exists) he deliberately designed a system containing what you call the “uncontrollable mistakes”, because it was essential to his plan that cells/cell communities should be "free to change" in order to find their own modes of survival but would eventually die both individually and collectively (the extinction of species, making way for new species).

DAVID: He designed evolution with direct intentionality to reach the production of sapiens.

dhw: His direct intentionality led to his designing life forms that had no connection with his intention, and that apparently is logical. The various alternative approaches I have proposed are all logical, according to you, and that makes them all totally illogical.[…]

DAVID: I've told you, and you like to ignore it, if I accept your strange form of God, your theories are logical in that context.

dhw: My theories explain the problem you have chosen to ignore month after month if not year after year. What is “strange” about a God who experiments, has new ideas as he goes along, or wishes to create an ever-changing free-for-all because, as you have told us, he enjoys creating and then watches his creations with interest?

dhw: The rest of your post simply goes on dodging the bolded question: if your God’s only purpose was to design humans and their food, why would he have designed countless extinct life forms and foods that had no connection with humans?

DAVID: Still ignoring all the ecosystems that supply life for all. Your tunnel vision is amazing. It is not just humans and their food, as you constantly parrot. All life lives by eating others, by therefore depending on others availability to supply energy. The entire bush is interrelated in the need for energy. Persistent life is a constant battle for equilibrium. Please, for once, see the big picture. Thank God, His view of needs wasn't yours.

Of course all life needs energy. How does that explain why your God deliberately designed all the extinct life forms and ecosystems that had no connection with humans, although according to you his one and only goal was to design humans and their food? It is you who deliberately ignore the “big picture”. Please stop dodging!


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