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

by dhw, Thursday, July 20, 2023, 09:57 (282 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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.

The comment was made in this same context of theodicy, and thank you for now confirming it so emphatically. No interest = boring, and so you are telling us that your God created evil so that his creations would be more interesting for him to watch. You have also told us that he created free will in order to produce unexpected results, which again would be more interesting for him than watching results he already knew.

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.

DAVID: Why argue? I agreed above.

Your reference to Walter Raleigh was entirely out of place. Thank you for now agreeing that your theory makes your God responsible for evil. You have solved the problem of theodicy: God is not all good.

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”.

DAVID: You are inflating simple adaptations into speciation as usual.

I am not inflating anything. Adaptation is part of the process of evolution!

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.

DAVID: 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.

Nobody knows what God is like, or even if he exists. How on earth does that justify the theory that he forced himself to design 99 out of 100 species that had nothing to do with his one and only purpose? And how does it invalidate the logic of my alternatives to your theories?

DAVID: 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.

You have agreed that we reflect your God and have thought patterns and emotions similar to his. My theories fit in logically with the history of life. What original statement and “true context” are you referring to? You have even agreed in this post that your God “should be interested in his creations”, and Eden would not be interesting, and so he created evil. Why is relief of boredom, and creating interesting evil, less “humanized” than conducting interesting experiments, or creating a free-for-all in which the unexpected is more interesting than the expected?