Return to David's theory of evolution PARTS ONE & TWO (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 30, 2023, 15:54 (541 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Theodicy is not confined to molecules! You object to my theories because they involve a God who is not all-knowing. Neither my list nor the Adam and Eve story is limited to molecules – an all-knowing God would have known that all the evils of the world would result from his work, and since he is also all-powerful, one could only assume that he wanted what he created. You do him no favours with your “all-knowing” theory.

DAVID: With free will God knew evil would occur. He knew errors would occur in a free moving molecular system of life. But that is the only system that creates life that He knows of.

dhw: Once more: theodicy is not confined to molecules, and I am pointing out to you the kind of God you are creating if you insist on his being all-knowing. I have now bolded the reason for this exchange, and the summary, since you have ignored it.

My statement above ignores nothing. Of course, He wanted what He created. You are still wrapped up with the Bible's God. Giving us free-will allows evil to appear. Free-wheeling molecular reactions result in bad mutations, but the speed at which life runs requires that rapidity. He knew about the problems you raise. Note safeguards in the genome.

DAVID: So now you accept evolution as totally efficient?

dhw: Efficiency depends on the purpose! You say it’s inefficient because you insist that your God was forced to create species that were irrelevant to his purpose. If God doesn’t exist, then the question of efficiency doesn’t even arise. If God does exist and his purpose was to create a free-for-all, or to experiment with new ideas, or to experiment with a view to finding a particular formula that would produce a particular species (plus food), then yes, in all cases he got what he wanted without having to do anything he didn’t want to do. I’d call that efficient.

DAVID: And I would call that a powerless very humanized form of an imagined God.
And:
An all-knowing God knows what will work and what cannot work and choses the best approach always.

dhw: A God who achieves what he wants to achieve is apparently powerless and very humanized, whereas an all-powerful, all-knowing God who designs a messy, inefficient method to achieve his purpose, has no control over the environmental conditions which limit his scope for speciation, knows he is creating all kinds of evil, and is powerless to prevent mistakes that arise from molecules that mess up their folding etc. “always chooses the best approach”. I shudder to think what the worst approach would be. NB in anticipation of your usual complaint: This is not a criticism of your God, but of your theories which lead you to this image of your God.

Your experimenting, goalless God is like none I recognize. He creates the same cumbersome evolution as mine, but because He is not all-knowing suddenly His evolution is OK. Weird. By wandering into an endpoint of humans, that makes it all correct. Both our God's are all-knowing enough to create life, but then yours loses some of His mental ability. God is continuously the same but yours varies in mental ability as He progresses.

See Wiki on the subject:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_paradox

"The conclusion is that the statement "God can do anything" needs to be qualified. By this logic God cannot do both of two things that are mutually contradictory. C. S. Lewis says that logical contradictions are not a "thing". Rather they are nonsense. The question (and therefore the perceived paradox) is meaningless. Nonsense does not suddenly acquire sense and meaning with the addition of the two words, "God can" before it."