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

by dhw, Friday, July 21, 2023, 08:50 (281 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

dhw: 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.

dhw: […] You have solved the problem of theodicy: God is not all good.

That presumably marks the end of the discussion on theodicy from your point of view, and I needn't repeat my alternatives. What follows concerns your theory of evolution.

DAVID: […] God creates with the simple purpose of creating.

Not according to you. He approached creation with the one and only purpose of designing us and our food. […]

DAVID: He then may follow with interest.

Your earlier theory was that he ENJOYED creating, and was interested in his creations. Of course you can’t be interested in them until you have created them, but how does that come to mean that his purpose was not to enjoy creating things that would interest him?

DAVID: He does not create to be entertained, as your God does. Stop interpreting my concept of God in your humanizing terms.

Then forget the word “entertained”*** and stick to “interested”. Why, if you are sure he enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, would he NOT want to create things that would interest him? In your own words, “I agree God would be bored by Eden…”. And so, according to last week’s theory, he deliberately created evil as a challenge, and created free will so that it could produce unexpected results. It is YOU who have used all these “humanizing” terms! Why are you now criticising them?

*** I owe you an apology. I have fought long and hard against your use of “entertainment”, but I have just discovered that I used it myself in the “brief guide”, which I am revising. I am removing it because it is far too superficial.

DAVID: You are still denying God chose to evolve us from bacteria. 99.9% are required to be lost.

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.

All met with a profound silence – which is no doubt due to the fact that you have no idea why your God would behave so illogically.

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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?

No answer.

dhw: 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. […]

dhw: 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. […] 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?

No reply.

DAVID: He experiments because He can't see a road to His nebulous purposes, which may not even exist!!

Your usual distortion. In my first experimental theory, he sets out to design a being like himself (= your own theory), in my second, he creates for enjoyment and interest (a perfectly acceptable purpose in itself), and gets new ideas as he goes along. In my third, he creates a free-for-all for the same purpose.

DAVID: And sure He is totally interested since He has no idea what is coming next. And this is the same guy who made our universe and started life? Totally incompatible aspects of your so-called God.

There is nothing incompatible about a God who starts life in order to have something interesting to watch, and therefore creates something interesting to watch. The only incompatible theories we have so far are yours concerning an all-powerful God who is forced to design 99 out of 100 species that are irrelevant to his purpose, and an all-good God who deliberately creates evil.