Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 06, 2022, 17:00 (597 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: More of the same gloomy approach.

dhw: 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.

I'm just following the views in Salvo magazine. Your approach is why I offered the article about liberals and conservatives and how we are so opposite

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

dhw: 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.

1) God's goal and method is simple: design a series of stepwise forms until sapiens is reached. 2) God's design totally explains the Cambrian Explosion. 3) ecosystems are highly structured free-for-all battles for food, nothing like your imagined God's weak free-for-all loss of control over evolution. Satisfied?

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!

dhw: 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!

You are confused again. I fully accept history as God's creation. After that precise step, I then theorize about God's actions, and of course, they make sense to me if not you.

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

dhw: 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!

Once again you are trying to invent a personal God who cares about us. Adler warns he odds are 50/50.

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.

dhw: 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?

All true. Again, God is a personage like no other person!!! I can only go so far recognizing God does everything He does for His own unknown-to-us reasons.