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

by dhw, Monday, July 24, 2023, 09:07 (278 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: 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: Apology. Always put 'my' in front of God in my statements.

Thank you. Now my question to you is why your God, who according to you enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, cannot possibly create things because he wants to enjoy creating things that will interest him.

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: Your God's thought patterns are very human.

Wrong way round. Since he is supposed to have created us and we reflect him, our human thought patterns are very godlike. We purposefully create things out of enjoyment and interest, just as he does.

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.

dhw: 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: When I describe God, He is my chosen form of God.

And I am not disagreeing with God but with your choice of God’s purpose and method, which
even you find totally incomprehensible, as you cannot find a single reason for such a messy, cumbersome, inefficient method to achieve the purpose you have chosen for your God.

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.

dhw: 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: God's form of stages of designed organisms is Darwin's evolution.

I’m delighted to hear you supporting Darwin’s theory of organisms developing in stages, but I don’t recall Darwin telling us that every stage of every organism extant and extinct was individually designed by God for the sole purpose of specially designing us and our food, although 99% of them had no connection with us and our food.

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

dhw: 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: I view God as creator of reality and therefore of the historical evolutionary process. It was His unforced method.

If God exists, I would also regard him as the creator of reality and of the historical evolutionary process. But I would not regard him as the messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer of a method which meant he had to design 99 out of 100 species for the sole purpose of designing us and our food. Will you please stop trying to hide the absurdity of your theories behind these perfectly acceptable generalisations.

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I admit there is a problem. Evil exists.

Thank you. Perhaps you will also admit that your theory, which has him deliberately creating evil as a “challenge”, runs totally counter to the concept of an all-good God.