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

by David Turell , Monday, November 08, 2021, 14:28 (1112 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: […] maybe, instead of being forced by circumstances (which he himself had created) into designing fallible molecules which he could not always control, hard though he tried, he deliberately built in a degree of freedom as part of an overall scheme to give all life’s components the flexibility to design the countless life forms which make up the history of evolution.

DAVID: Fallible molecules can't design new species. Molecular mistakes make mutations, most of which are fully demonstrated as dangerous.

dhw: You have missed the point (now bolded): I am proposing that your God (if he exists) deliberately designed the whole system, from single cells all the way to human free will, to allow all organisms the freedom to do their own thinking, designing, behaving. Hence the higgledy-piggledy comings and goings in the vast bush of life.

That is a twist on panpsychism, but in my view humans were His desired endpoint of evolution, so your kind of God hopes for humans appearing by chance.

dhw: You simply refuse to stick to the subject! Theodicy asks why there is bad in the world if the God who created it is all-good. And you keep answering: ignore the bad and focus on the good. That is not an answer!

DAVID: You have inserted, once again, the all-good God. I guess back to your childhood religious teaching. I don't know if He is all good, loves us, etc. Adler and I say 50/50. And yet Adler and I believe in Him!

dhw: You were the one who raised the problem of theodicy, which is the problem of how an all-good and all-powerful God can produce bad, not the problem of whether we believe in God! Now you’re pretending that I’m claiming God is all-good! If you and Adler think your God may be partly good and partly bad, that’s up to you. A partly nasty God is one solution to the problem of theodicy.

Exactly!! God may simply create without a thought of love or caring. He may have added editing to stop molecular mistakes simply out of despair that the system could not as perfect as He wished