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

by David Turell , Wednesday, July 19, 2023, 16:48 (283 days ago) @ dhw

Theodicy

DAVID: Only humans get bored. This comment about your God reflects your humanizing of Him.

dhw; A week ago, you wrote: “I agree God would be bored by Eden, as a theoretical consideration.” All our discussions – including that concerning the existence of your God – are theoretical considerations, and so you agree that your God could be bored by Eden. Please stop contradicting yourself.

You love to pounce on comments made in other contexts. The evidence for your humanized God is constant and overwhelming. A creating God should be interested in watching His creations in action. No action in Eden, no interest was my previous intent.

DAVID: Yes, free will allowed humans to be evil which is the same result as Walter Raleigh and smoking. And yes, God knew.

dhw: The point of the Walter Raleigh analogy is that he did NOT know that smoking would have “evil results”, and so we cannot blame him. Your all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God designed humans in full knowledge of the fact that they would commit evil acts, and that makes him responsible for evil.

Why argue? I agreed above.

DAVID: Dashing off again and misunderstanding that the current daily activities of bugs follows from their freedom to act. Evolution not involved.

dhw: Even today, bugs both good and bad mutate in order to combat new threats to their existence. Of course evolution is “involved”.

You are inflating simple adaptations into speciation as usual.

David’s theory of evolution

DAVID: You are still denying God chose to evolve us from bacteria. 99.9% are required to be lost.
And:
DAVID: 99.9% had to disappear if evolution is a method of culling to achieve better results. God chose to evolve us. You cannot deny that point. All connected

dhw: I am convinced that Darwin was right, and all life including ourselves has evolved from the earliest cells, whether God exists or not. I agree that 99% or 99.9% are lost. I do not agree that an all-powerful, all-knowing God would have started out with the one and only purpose of designing us plus food but despite his omnipotence and omniscience, and despite your belief that he was perfectly capable of creating phenotypes “de novo”, found himself “required” to design 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with his purpose. You can’t understand it either. You even denigrate your God by insisting that his design system is messy, cumbersome and inefficient. I have offered you three alternative explanations for the 99% which make perfect sense to you, but which you reject on the absurd grounds that in some way they “humanise” your God, although you agree that we reflect him and have thought patterns in common with his own.

In "How to Think About God", Adler tells us that God is not like us so that any attempt at comparisons is tenuous at best. What makes perfect sense to me about your theories is to accept them from a highly humanized God standpoint. Stop ignoring my original statement in true context.