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

by dhw, Tuesday, July 18, 2023, 11:09 (284 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Sorry. I have gotten tired of your same exposition of your same theory. A God who cannot foresee the future of His creations is an intellectually blinded distortion of a true God.

Sorry, but I have gotten tired of your same response, which even ignores your own concessions. You agree that God would be bored by Eden, and you agree that free will means humans producing unexpected results, but you refuse to link the two observations together: a God who does not want to be bored may have deliberately created the whole history of life to produce unexpected results, which would be far less boring than results which he already knows in advance. This is not “intellectual blindness”, and you have no more idea than I have of what constitutes a “true” God.

DAVID: It does not exonerate Him from blame.

Your usual self-contradictory view that an all-good God deliberately created beings he knew would commit evil (as a challenge to the goodies)– and so is to “blame” for all the evil and its resultant suffering, and yet at the same time you “blame” humans for using their free will to commit evil deeds (as below) and thus try to exonerate God.

DAVID: I've read endless theodicy excuses and leave unimpressed. The semi-uncontrolled biochemical system of life is the best that can be. Only an all-knowing God could find it. Viruses and bacteria must be a part of it, doing much good and also some bad. Free will made evil people not God. I still follow Dayenu, it is enough. My mole hill is your Everest.

A complete muddle. One moment your all-powerful God is in complete control of evolution, but now he is only in semi-control, and he is incapable of designing a Garden of Eden, although he could have done so but a Garden of Eden would have been boring for him. See above for my version of free will exonerating God from blame, your denial that it exonerates him, and now your belief that free will does exonerate him (“Free will made evil people not God”.) And the problem of theodicy is not solved by pretending that evil is only a molehill which we should ignore.

dhw: if we study the complexities of living organisms, it seems perfectly reasonable to both of us to argue that they support the theory of design. But if we study the history of life, it seems totally unreasonable to me to assume that an all-powerful designer would deliberately design 99 out of 100 organisms that had no connection whatsoever with the only organisms he wanted to design. You yourself can make no sense of it, and yet you cling to it. See also below.

DAVID: You are denying the fact of evolution within the assumption God is the creator of life, which evolved us as an endpoint.

I am not denying evolution or the possibility that God created life. Nor do I deny that we are the latest species to have evolved. Yet again, you choose to sidetrack the illogical, self-contradictory theories I object to, which are that an all-powerful, all knowing, all-good God would have deliberately and knowingly designed 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with the only species he wanted to design, and that an all-good, all-knowing God would have deliberately and knowingly created evil with all the suffering that accompanies it.

dhw: Yes, organisms are an excellent design, but you are the one who, through your anthropocentric theory of evolution, castigate your God as a messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer! I don’t. If I believed in God, it would be in a God who designs what he wants to design, as he does in all three of my alternatives. You do not “accept God as he is.” Nobody knows God “as he is”. You only accept your inconsistent, self-contradictory theories of what God is: an excellent inefficient designer, and an all-good creator of evil.

DAVID: Again incapable of separating two issues! You admit great designs, but the evolutionary process is a system of culling which naturally results in 99.9% losses along the way. Cumbersome only when compared to direct creation.

They are not two issues! He brilliantly designs 100 life forms, but according to you, 99 of them have no connection with his one and only purpose. You usually use the word “naturally” to dissociate events from your God’s doing. Once again, you seem “incapable” of recognizing that your God, as first-cause creator of everything, would have designed the system which made him design 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with his one and only purpose. That in your own words makes him a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer. Please stop dodging.