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

by dhw, Friday, June 23, 2023, 11:46 (309 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: So a lack of knowledge exonerates your God from all the evils He creates? Preposterous.

dhw: If it is preposterous to “exonerate” him, and he creates the evils, you are blaming him for creating the evils.

DAVID: You admit your God created evils.

dhw: Once more: Evil exists, and we are trying to solve the problem of why a supposedly all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God, the Creator of all things, would have created it. Your theory is that he wanted it, is fully to blame for it, but as it’s only a minor blip (you even argue later that 10 million cancer victims and 89 million refugees from human evil do not justify the epithet “rampant”), we shouldn’t even think about it. I offer alternatives, which include the proposal that he didn’t know initially what damage his experiments, inventions and discoveries might do (the Walter Raleigh “syndrome”). But you insist that he is 100% guilty. Maybe you’re right. But that conflicts with the view that your God is all-good.

Perhaps understandably, you have now dropped the subject, but it casts its shadow again over the new purpose you attribute to your God at the end of this post. The dog-eat-dog metaphor applies to most forms of evil - in nature as in human affairs - which result from self-interest.

DAVID: Your God produced the same 99.9% loss in evolution, didn't He.

dhw: [...] You say they were mistakes, and I say they were successful experiments by himself or by his inventions!

DAVID: Your God's experiments were 99.9% failures!!! That can't be ignored. We see only one evolutionary process.

They were not God's failures (if he exists)! This is made abundantly clear by the next exchange:

DAVID: The amazing battles continue. It is still a dog-eat-dog world with each side capable of adapting.

dhw: This sums up the world of good and evil. Your God does not intervene. So maybe this free-for-all battle for survival, with its vast range of variations, adaptations, innovations, comings and goings, goods and bads, was his purpose right from the start.[…]

DAVID: […] I've always thought God created a dog-eat-dog world. One purpose, another was humans.

You have always acknowledged the dog-eat-dog element of life’s history. But you have always claimed that the creation of humans plus food was his only purpose. That is why you consider the 99% of past species to have been failures – because they did not lead to humans plus food. But if his purpose was to create a dog-eat-dog world, the 99% of losses were the direct consequence of the free-for-all he intended to create from the beginning. Whether he designed the 99% directly, or gave them the ability to design themselves, makes no difference. Dog-eat-dog, producing an ever changing variety of “dogs”, was the purpose, and so every dog was relevant to that purpose. Now ask yourself what was the purpose of dog-eat-dog, if it was not to provide enjoyment of creation and interest in the ever changing products of creation.