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

by David Turell , Friday, July 21, 2023, 16:04 (281 days ago) @ dhw

Theodicy

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

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

The intended endpoint does not distort God's wish to create, as you try to claim.

DAVID: He then may follow with interest.

dhw: 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?

Stop it. My God creates simply to create what He wishes. Enjoyment and interest are very secondary events. He is not your over-humanized God.

dhw: 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?

When seen as secondary to purpose, they are not humanizing like your God.

dhw: *** 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.

Same dialogue as usual. Your frail human logic is not God's. God chose to evolve us for His own unknown reasons, my usual response.

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.

Same dialogue as usual. Your frail human logic is not God's. God chose to evolve us for His own unknown reasons, my usual response. My God acts purely with purpose, not for secondary benefits to His personality, like yours does.

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

dhw: 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),

The bold fits only if you are fully human.

dhw; and gets new ideas as he goes along. In my third, he creates a free-for-all for the same purpose.

An all-knowing God has all the needed ideas and purposes from the beginning. And the free-for-alls only purpose is to entertain your humanized God!

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.

dhw: 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.

My God is not 'forced' to evolve us. He chose to do it. All evil is a byproduct of His good works.