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

by David Turell , Sunday, June 18, 2023, 17:24 (522 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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.

I keep telling you the bad sided is a tiny side and the good side is the big side, but you keep your magnifying glasses where you wish them. Perhaps we should put aside all the bugs in your colon which help you in so many ways, as long as they stay at home. An example of the tradeoffs we live with necessarily. As for bacteria and viruses with free will, It doesn't exist.

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.

dhw: 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.

Your unknowing God must have no problem since He is ignorant of them. Ridiculous.

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.

dhw: 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.

Your God conduced the only evolutionary process we see. How do you explain His role? He produced the same result my God did in the same roundabout way. And they both had viruses and bacteria in the mix, but only your guy is OK because He was ignorant of what might turn out bad.