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

by David Turell @, Tuesday, November 09, 2021, 14:38 (860 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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.

DAVID: 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: He can always dabble if he wishes to. But my various theories cover all eventualities. If humans were his desired goal or endpoint, I offer experimentation to explain all the other life forms, or new ideas as your God goes along. The free-for-all is one of several logical explanations I offer.

But all eventualities are not correct. I have chosen what I think is correct, considering God as creator, and you haven't.


Under “sensing autonomic activity
DAVID:: Here again we note the good body responses can make mistakes, despite the fact that the protective processes must necessarily be present to edit responses within proper bounds. A system fault when running on its own is not God's fault. dhw would like Him to supervise every biochemical reaction on Earth! (dhw’s bold)

dhw: Congratulations, you have understood a possible explanation of theodicy. By creating systems that run on their own and make errors on their own, your all-powerful God cannot be held responsible for the bad results. Hence my proposal: he did not wish to supervise, control, preprogramme or dabble every reaction of cells, of animals, of humans, or of any life forms; and so he created the system he WANTED to create, not the system he was forced to create because of the conditions he had created.

My position differs. The ONLY system that could/would work allows for molecular errors. A rigid highly controlled system would be too sluggish to work. The current system allows free-floating molecules to act instantly in nanoseconds with no time for review and editing.


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.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: So now you have your all-powerful, all-knowing, possibly uncaring God in despair at being unable to create what he wishes to create. Your God gets more human and less God-like by the paragraph. But it’s a possible solution to the theodicy problem. While I have him creating what he wanted to create, you still have him trying to make up for his inability to do what he wants to do, despite his being all-powerful and all-knowing.

Editing systems are proof God recognized the need for error-correction. From above: "The ONLY system that could/would work allows for molecular errors. A rigid highly controlled system would be too sluggish to work. The current system allows free-floating molecules to act instantly in nanoseconds with no time for review and editing."


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