Theodicy: solution lies in definition of God (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, October 18, 2021, 09:05 (1131 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The 'changing spectacle' is the process of evolution, nothing more. You need spectacle for your humanized God.

dhw: Why is that “namby-pamby” and why is it more “humanized” than a God who tries but sometimes fails to correct the errors caused by the system he designed?

DAVID: As a result of His editing systems, actual errors are exceedingly rare, considering the number of processes in action per second, a fact you distort constantly.

No matter much you try to draw attention to the successes, it is the failures that make the problem of theodicy. Your dismissal of the vast suffering caused by what you believe to be your God’s deliberate design of bad viruses and bacteria, and by the uncontrollable errors in the system he designed, is tantamount to saying that we should ignore the subject we are supposed to be discussing.

dhw: You have now decided that your all-powerful God was incapable of designing a perfect system, and tried but often failed to “edit” for errors. For example, you believe that the production of new antibodies against new invaders is automatic, so what happened to the 4,882,066 people who up until last Friday had been killed by the Corona virus your God designed for good reasons as yet unknown? (If you don’t believe your God designed this particular virus, then substitute any other killer virus you think he did design.) May I suggest that even if these people’s cells recognized the foreign invader, they were unable to design the required new antibodies – as opposed to your God’s automated process mysteriously failing to spring into action?

DAVID: Now we are into world politics. It is my firm belief the Chinese lab under a program financed by the USA to 'enhance function' invented/designed the killer virus like no other which can evade our natural immunity. We will be taking vaccines for this bug twice a year for life. all because the Chinese plan to dominate the Earth.

I deliberately inserted the now bolded parenthesis in order to avoid this political digression, which you continue in a separate post; https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2021/10/14/10_ways_the_chinese_government_lied_mi...

This may well be horrifyingly correct, and it’s fine if you want to change the subject. I’ll stick to theodicy.

dhw: For reasons which you refuse to offer, you regard a God who produces what he wants to produce as namby-pamby and more human than a God whose powers are limited and who tries (often in vain) to make up for his limitations. NB In view of past distortions, this is not a criticism of your God but a criticism of your concept of your God.

DAVID: I've compared my all-powerful God to your experimenting, not-in-full-control God wandering toward unknown goals as a humanized God. And I haven't explained my complaint? Really.

But my complaint is that your God is NOT all-powerful. On the contrary, his powers are limited: he, who created everything from scratch, is incapable of devising a system that does not contain errors, and he tries his best to correct them but often fails, leaving it to us humans to try and do what he couldn’t do! The God I have proposed is one who does precisely what he wants to do (the free-for-all, or experimenting with or even without any particular goal other than enjoying his own creativity and in all cases watching the results with interest). You simply refuse to tell me why it is less “humanized” to have limited powers and to be unable to correct errors than it is for him to do precisely what he wants to do.

dhw: How our consciousness is meant to explain the errors in the system – the “bad” side of life that creates the problem of theodicy – I really don’t know, except that our free-running conscious human behaviour is probably the greatest source of what we call the “bad” side of life!

DAVID: You don't like our free will and to debate God and His works? Really? I enjoyed your children's novel and plays I read, all from your free-will consciousness.

Thank you for the compliment. I love our free will. And I love and wonder at all the good things about life. But I don’t like all the bad things. It’s the bad things that raise the problem of theodicy, but you’d rather not talk about them. I understand, so I would leave you to pretend they just don’t matter, except that I strongly believe that your compassionate nature would have endeared you to all your patients, and I very much doubt that you tried to console them by telling them that they were the victims of very rare mistakes in the system, or of nasty bugs which God created with the best of intentions, though we don't yet know what they were.