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

by dhw, Sunday, July 23, 2023, 12:47 (487 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: If he exists, then of course he would create what he wishes. That is the major problem with your theory of evolution: he only wishes to create us and our food, and so he creates 99 out 100 species that have nothing to do with his one and only wish. I am the one who proposes that he wishes to create those 99, and it makes perfect sense that he does so because he enjoys creating, and finds this vast and changing variety of life forms interesting to watch.

DAVID: God does not create to find something interesting to watch.

Please stop making these authoritative statements. You don’t know any more than I do what your God – if he exists – thinks and wants. If we’re interested, we can only theorize and then test the reasonableness of our theories in relation to what we know of life’s history.

DAVID: When God made the Big Bang, He knew humans would appear because all His actions are purposeful.

But even for you it makes no sense for an all-powerful, all-knowing God to perform 99 out of 100 actions that had no connection with what you insist was his one and only purpose. “God has His unknown reasons”, and you can’t think of a single one. Stop dodging.

dhw: […] It is YOU who have used all these “humanizing” terms! Why are you now criticising them?

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

dhw: Great! I propose that enjoyment and interest are not secondary to purpose but ARE purpose, so according to your logic, they are not “humanizing”! And indeed, if we reflect him, as you say we do, then our enjoyment of creating interesting things will reflect his, i.e. we are not “humanizing” God, but God has given us some of his characteristics.

DAVID: This humanistic reasoning is why your God is essentially human in thought.
And later:
DAVID: Your weird bolded point again makes God human like your preferred form of God.

I'll repeat the above, since you have ignored it: In your own words, we reflect God and have thought patterns like his. That means that we follow God’s example, not that he follows ours, i.e. we are godlike, as opposed to him being humanlike.

DAVID: God chose to evolve us as His method of creation. Your human reasoning is not God's, but a weak attempt to disagree with God. God wins.

I am not disagreeing with God but with your irrational, illogical, self-contradictory and even derogatory (“messy”, “cumbersome”, “inefficient”) interpretation of your God’s purpose and method. Stop dodging, and stop pretending you know God’s unknowable thoughts.

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 bbball-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.

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

dhw: I did not say he was forced to evolve us! Stop misquoting! Firstly, according to you he was forced to design 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with us plus food because in his messy, cumbersome, inefficient way he couldn’t think of any other method. And secondly, according to you, he knew in advance that he was creating evil as well as good, but he deliberately went ahead all the same, because it would provide some sort of challenge. Your all-good God therefore deliberately created evil.

DAVID: God evolving us demonstrates His method of choice.

Agreed, if God exists. However, “evolve” in most people’s minds is not synonymous with “individually design”, and you always omit the fact that every other life form extant and extant also evolved.

DAVID: An all-powerful God had many methods at His command.

And yet according to you, for the thousandth time, he chose a method which forced him to design 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with what, according to you, was his one and only purpose. Strange choice, don’t you think? Messy, cumbersome and inefficient. Or maybe that wasn’t his method, or maybe that wasn’t his purpose.

DAVID: Evil is a small partial byproduct of God's good works.

This “small byproduct” causes untold suffering, as your God knew it would. And one cannot solve the problem of theodicy by pretending there is no problem.