Return to David's theory of evolution and theodicy (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, June 18, 2023, 11:25 (314 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You make it sound as if your all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, first-cause God was somehow forced into using a system he knew would create evil! I am as glad as you are that we are here. That does not mean I must shut my eyes to the sufferings of millions of people which result from what you believe to have been his deliberate creation of all the “evils” he apparently knew would happen. It is the age-old problem of THEODICY which you are determined to ignore.

DAVID: I don't ignore theodicy. I have a vastly different view than you. Free will released evil in humans, not God.

Your all-knowing God created bacteria and viruses and humans in the full knowledge of all the harm (as well as the good) that they would do. If a scientist produced a robot which he knew would do lots of wonderful things but would also go round murdering people, you would not hesitate to condemn him. (That is actually the fear now being expressed by a number of scientists working in AI.) Your defence of your God is that he gave us free will. The prosecution will say that he knew he was creating murderers, and did so of his OWN free will.
The case of murderous bacteria and viruses raises another issue: do they have free will? If evil bacteria and viruses have free will, then clearly they must have the autonomous intelligence to make their own choices. (If they don't have free will, then your God has no defence at all!) And if the baddies have autonomous intelligence, it stands to reason that the goodies must also have autonomous intelligence. What a neat way to dovetail two of our controversial topics.

DAVID: The tiny incidents of biochemical errors remain and build into larger numbers, so you pounce on a collective, which does not represent the system's efficiency.

The biochemical errors throw doubt on your all-powerful God’s efficiency. The deliberate creation of “evil” throws doubt on his all-goodness, and is compounded by his all-knowingness. Hence the problem of theodicy.

dhw: […] Since we agree that he would only have created what he wanted to create, in your scenario he must therefore have wanted all the evil he knew would happen. […]

DAVID: The wrong conclusion. Yes, God created our free will, but that means He wanted humans to handle the problem we create, and we do, as best we can.

Thank you for supporting the concept of a free-for-all, which you readily accept for humans but totally reject as an explanation for the rest of life’s history. I have no objections to that concept. However, it doesn’t alter the fact that your God deliberately created all the potential for evil since he knew in advance all the harm that his humans and his bacteria and viruses and his disease-causing mistakes would cause.

dhw: When we try to ascertain his purpose/s, you come up with just one: to create us and our food. You have no idea why he therefore created 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with us and our food. When you tell us you are certain that he enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, and wants our recognition, and that we “reflect” him (so he and we have thought patterns and emotions in common), you contradict yourself by claiming that these aspects of his personality make him too human. And it is patently absurd to claim that they could not at least be part of his purpose/s.

DAVID: That humans are/were His goal does not make Him into the tunnel-visioned caricature of a God you always distort. By comparison your experimenting God is directionless, waiting for the results of each experiment to tell him what to try next.

It is your own God who is tunnel-visioned, since you restrict him to the single purpose of creating us and our food, thereby making him a messy, cumbersome, inefficient (all your own words) caricature of a God, because he proceeds to design 99 out of 100 life forms that have no connection with his one and only purpose. By contrast, ONE of my theories has him with the same “direction” as yours, but experimenting – just like us humans – to find the best formula, while the other two are as bolded above, again following thought patterns which you accept although you desperately try to ignore their implications.