Theodicy: the 'good' view of viruses (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, November 05, 2021, 13:18 (1115 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I’m amazed at your knowledge of your all-powerful God’s limitations, and your fixed belief that he could not possibly have deliberately designed the existing system because that was what he WANTED to design rather than what he was forced to design by the conditions he himself had created.

DAVID: I do not view God as limited as I accept our current biochemical system of life as the only one that will work. Termed another way, God is omnipotent, omniscient, and knowing the results in advance set up the current systems of edits to prevent as many errors as He could.

dhw: He has total power over everything, and he knows everything, but He couldn’t design an error-free system, and he didn’t know how to correct some of the errors it produced, although amazingly he designed the brains that enable us to correct some of the errors he couldn’t correct. And he did not design this system because he WANTED it as it is, but because despite his omnipotence and omniscience, and his wishing he could do it differently, the conditions he created gave him no choice. Poor, helpless, all-powerful, all-knowing God.

Not helpless: He invented life after He invented our universe. Lets imagine a human example of a perfectly designed process. It relies upon a thousand workers doing their job and has a few foremen watching as guiders producing perfect products. If individual workmen make unnoticed mistakes, the product is bad. That is how I view the living process God produced. It relies on free-floating molecules to join properly, to fold properly under changing stimuli. They are the workman in the human analogy and foremen the editing systems. The designer recognized errors could occur, in the only design that would produce life.

The good viruses do

dhw: You continue to ignore the fact that our subject is theodicy, which means an attempt to explain why an all-good God would produce bad. The problem is not solved by focusing on the good and ignoring the bad.

DAVID: I never ignored the bad. I'm trying to establish the degree of bad with you. How huge is it or how small as a percentage of all of us? US male life expectancy is about 78 years. Is that good or bad? 10,000 years ago it was thought to have been in the forties. Much longer now despite all God's terrible errors? Why? How?

dhw: So instead of discussing the problem of theodicy (i.e. why an all-good God would produce bad things) you want to discuss the amount of good versus bad. Not only that, but we should focus on all the wonderful things humans have done in order to increase our resistance to the errors your omnipotent, omniscient God could not prevent. Well done us, for increasing our life expectancy!

I asked for a bad percentage in your eyes. No answer. Is it too small for debate?