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

by dhw, Wednesday, November 10, 2021, 11:34 (860 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ...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.

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

Of course they aren’t all correct, but they all consider God as creator. The difference between my theories and your theory is that you agree mine all fit in logically with life’s history, whereas you can’t find any logical explanation for yours.

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.

DAVID: 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.

You keep confining the discussion to molecules, and you keep insisting that your all-powerful God was forced to create an imperfect system because of the conditions which he himself created. The “bad” of life is not confined to free-floating molecules! In the rest of this post, you continue to ignore the overall problem of the “bad”, and cling to your molecules:

DAVID: 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.

A wonderfully humanized God despairs at having been forced to create an imperfect system against his own wishes. But I accept that it is a possible solution to the theodicy problem: he is all-good but not all-powerful and was forced to create “bad” by circumstances beyond his own control.


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