Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 06, 2022, 07:34 (599 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You always emphasize the horrible, while it is present it is a minuscule portion of all daily events.

dhw: The problem of theodicy is why an all-good God would have created bad. You do not solve the problem by pretending that disease, flood, famine, natural catastrophes etc. are “a minuscule portion of daily events”, bearing in mind that all these horrors also took place long before sapiens became able to interfere with Nature.

DAVID: More of the same gloomy approach.

Congratulations on your highly original solution to the problem of theodicy: shut your eyes to the existence of bad. I wonder what you used to tell your patients when they came to you for help: “Your cripplingly painful and terminal disease is a minuscule portion of daily events. Go home and praise God for his goodness.” Luckily, I happen to know that you do not practise what you appear to preach.

dhw: 1) your theory that we are descended from species your God designed without precursors makes nonsense of the theory that we were his goal from the very beginning, if all he designed pre-Cambrian were species that did NOT lead to us! (But elsewhere, you agree that we descended from bacteria!) […] 2) The Cambrian remains a mystery, but gaps in the fossil record do not necessarily mean that there were no precursors (new fossil finds have blurred some of the apparent borderlines between Ediacaran and Cambrian) or that a sudden major change in the environment (e.g. an increase in oxygen) could not have produced sudden major changes resulting in speciation. See "More miscellany”. 3) Thank you for acknowledging that ecosystems all over the world and throughout the history of life are a free-for-all. The exact opposite of your theory that every single one throughout 3.8 billion years was an “absolute requirement” in preparation for us and our food.

DAVID: It is beyond amazing that you do not recognize the Cambrian Explosion requires a designer.

This is a new form of discussion. Ignore every point your interlocutor makes! I have inserted numbers for you. 1) your contradictory theories about your designer’s goal and method; 2) possible explanations for the sudden appearance of new Cambrian species, neither of which exclude your designer as the inventor of life and evolution; 3) another contradiction of your own theory about your designer’s goal and method. Your response to them all: I should recognize that there is a designer.

dhw: Once more, please tell us which of your theories “make sense only to God”, i.e. not to you.

DAVID: When will you recognize I accept what God did for His own reasons. That means it all makes sense to me!

Accepting your own theories about what God did for reasons which you don’t know and which make sense only to God does not mean that your theories make sense to you!
I went on to suggest reasons why God, if he exists, might have created life.

DAVID: All human guesses of God's possible personal reactions to His creations.

dhw: Wrong. They are guesses/proposals concerning his reasons for creating his creations. And each of them is based on your own belief that he feels these emotions. Even you must recognize how daft it is to believe that from the very beginning your God wanted to design humans, but only after he had designed them did he realize that he wanted them to recognize him, admire his work and have a relationship with him! Or he enjoyed creating, but didn’t realize he enjoyed it until he’d done it...over and over again a few million times.

DAVID: Another humanizing view of God. God knew how we would react to Him well before creating us. God creates without self-interest.

So apparently he didn’t want us to recognize him, and admire his work and have a relationship with him. He made us for no reason at all. And so presumably he created the whole of life for no reason at all. He just knew in advance everything that would happen and how he would react to it. He did enjoy every individual act of creation, and he was interested in every individual creation, but he didn’t actually enjoy every individual act of creation until he’d done it, and wasn’t interested in every individual creation until it was already there. It would seem that your all-purposeful God never actually had a purpose at all when he created life and us!

DAVID: I'll remind God is a person like no other person. I view Him as creating without emotions driving His creations. Your humanized God is just the opposite.

dhw: We would all agree that if he exists, he is like no other person, but he can hardly be a person without having personal attributes. See above for the daftness of your belief that whatever his human thought patterns might be, they have played no part in his reason for creating life, including humans.

DAVID: His personal attributes do not influence His purposeful creations.

What purpose? How can you have a purpose that does not depend on your personal wishes, and how can you have personal wishes without personal attributes?