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

by dhw, Wednesday, May 31, 2023, 09:14 (540 days ago) @ David Turell

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.[…].

DAVID: […] 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.

Yet again, this is not just about molecules! If your God is all-knowing, of course he knew all about the problems I raise: as the creator of all things, he therefore knew that what he was creating would result in every disease, sin, evil act, disaster etc. throughout life’s history. If “He wanted what He created”, he must have wanted all of that. (He would also have wanted all the beautiful things, but those are not the problem here.) And so your objection to my alternative theories is based on your own theory that your God wanted to create all the evils and diseases and catastrophes and horrors he knew would result from his creations. Your God is not only an inefficient designer, but he is also a sadist.

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.

DAVID: Your experimenting, goalless God is like none I recognize.

In none of my theories is he goalless. How many folk do you think would recognize your inefficient sadist?

DAVID: He creates the same cumbersome evolution as mine, but because He is not all-knowing suddenly His evolution is OK.

It is because his experiments are successful that two of my versions are OK, and the third is OK because in a free-for-all, the enjoyment lies precisely in NOT knowing what will happen next.

DAVID: 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.

There is no “correctness” if he began his experiments as a voyage of discovery, learning, inventing new things. The “voyage” would have been what he wanted. When you learn something new, is that synonymous with losing some of your mental ability? (See “Neanderthal experimentation” in “Miscellany PART TWO”.)

DAVID: See Wiki on the subject:
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_paradox
QUOTE: "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."

A good description of your non-sense theory: An all-knowing, all-powerful God who invented an inefficient method that forced him to design 99 out of 100 species that had nothing do with his one and only purpose (sapiens plus food) is a piece of non-sense which “makes sense only to God” (i.e. not to you). Similarly there is no sense in claiming that your God is the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of all things, and then claiming that he is not responsible for all the bad things he alone must have created. Now please tell me what "mutually contradictory" things you have found in my alternatives.