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

by dhw, Friday, July 07, 2023, 13:21 (503 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

DAVID: The serpent and the fruit mean God chose to end the possibility of Eden. He meant for us to have a challenging life using our brain. And thus we are to deal with evil.

dhw: So you are now withdrawing your theory that God was incapable of designing a world without evil, but instead you have him deliberately creating evil as a challenge to us humans. Just for a moment, let’s leave aside theodicy and the question why he spent 3.X billion years designing 99 out of 100 organisms unrelated to humans so that they could kill one another in a battle to survive. We have always agreed that your God must have a purpose for whatever he does. So what do you think was the purpose of the challenge he set by deliberately creating humans who he knew would rob, rape, murder, exploit, wage war etc.

DAVID: God's purpose was to create a world with challenges, and He knew the number of criminals would be small compared to our total population. It meant it is our responsibility to control criminality.

I have asked you what you think was his purpose in creating a world with challenges, and you merely repeat that his purpose was to create a world with challenges! Why do you think he wanted to create world with challenges? The proportion of evil to good is irrelevant, and so is our responsibility.

dhw: Two possible answers to the theodicy question are that he did not know in advance all the outcomes of his experiments, or he did not know (and did not want to know) in advance the outcomes of the free-for-all he set in motion.

DAVID: A creating God without anticipation is creating a world blindly. Not much of a creator.

dhw: You are certain that your God is interested in his creations. A creating God who WANTS to create a world which will interest him through its unpredictability is not creating it blindly. With your latest theory, do you think your all-knowing God watches us and knows precisely how we are all going to respond to the challenge?

DAVID: Yes, He follows us. Your blind God drifts along, entertained by the chaos He is partially creating.

“Follows”? Do you mean he watches us with interest? But in your theory he knows precisely how we are going to act, so why bother to “follow” us? My God can hardly be blind if he watches us with interest. But there are two separate questions here: why did your all-good God create evil (or why did he create a world of “challenges” in which good battles with evil), and why doesn’t he intervene now that he sees the chaos he has created? You have dodged the first question, and I have offered a list of possible responses to the second.

David's theory of evolution

DAVID: Since God chose to develop humans in a stepwise fashion through evolution, the 99.9% culled out are absolutely necessary.

dhw: In your nonsensical theory, the problem is not the culling but the deliberate creation of 99 unnecessary organisms which have to be culled!

DAVID: Nonsensical only in your Godless view. God chose to create us by evolving us. Your rudderless version did the same thing.

Hardly “godless”, since we are discussing your God’s motives and methods, not his existence. You keep repeating the mantra that focuses solely on us, and leaving out the nonsensical part of your theory, which is that in order to create us plus food, he deliberately designed 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with us plus food. My alternatives are not “rudderless” – they simply offer different methods and/or purposes from those you impose on him, though their combination makes no sense to you.

dhw: Only in my proposals are they successful, because his purpose is to create the ever changing variety of life forms which constitutes

DAVID: 99% successfully survived properly until they didn't.

Thank you for now adopting one of my theories, as opposed to your own, which until now has described them as failures because they had to be culled – hence your description of your God’s method of designing us as “messy, cumbersome and inefficient”.

DAVID: As for 'experimental' humans it requires luck to find the right answers.

So our motor cars, airplanes, rockets, computers, telephones, medicines, TV, weapons of mass destruction etc. were each invented “de novo” by a stroke of luck, were they?

dhw: You accept that like us he enjoys creating and is interested in his creations. Why shouldn’t our method of designing via experimentation, discovery, on-going improvements etc. reflect his own?

DAVID: Exactly, as we bumble along is not God-like. Review Thomas Edison's example of 'hard work required'.

Why is “hard work” bumbling? Don’t you think the above list of inventions is a reasonable analogy for the range of inventions that led from bacteria to the vast variety of species past and present, including ourselves?