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

by dhw, Friday, July 28, 2023, 11:31 (482 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your humanized God gets bored; my God doesn't. Evolution happened. My God did it and He expected the results.

dhw: My "humanized" God presumably didn’t get bored, since he invented ways of keeping himself interested.

DAVID: Again, you have God acting in self-interest. Find a God like that in any discussion of the theism of God's personality.

Then you had better call me a revolutionary philosopher of religion. Now please tell me why a God who according to you enjoys creating and is interested in his creations cannot possibly act out of the desire to enjoy creating things he will find interesting. (See Conclusion 4 below.)

DAVID: That God chose to evolve us is an entirely reasonable position.[…]

dhw: […] I am happy with evolution. It is the above bolded theory [i.e. that God specially designed 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with the only species you say he wanted to design – us and our food], I don’t like, plus your absurd declaration that your God is a brilliant designer who devised a messy, cumbersome, inefficient method of design to fulfil the purpose you impose on him. Stop dodging.

DAVID: Dodge what? Are the designs you see brilliant or not?

Yes, every cell and cell community is a brilliant design, and I am the one who rejects your depiction of him as a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer, because I do not for one second believe that if he had one purpose (us and our food) as you claim, he would messily, cumbersomely and inefficiently design 99 species out of 100 that were irrelevant to that purpose! So please stop dodging your own irrational theory and self-contradiction!

The rest of your post is covered by the list of conclusions:

dhw: Conclusions: 1) your “humanized” God used an inefficient method to fulfil the purpose you impose on him through a theory you yourself find incomprehensible.

DAVID: Incomprehensible denied!!! It is your confused and muddled psychological interpretation of my mind's thoughts. That I do not know God's reasons for using an evolutionary method does not make God incomprehensible to me. I accept He has good reasons for His actions that I DO NOT NEED TO KNOW AS YOU DO.

I did not say God was incomprehensible to you. It is your irrational theory, as bolded above, that you find incomprehensible, as you have now admitted again. Please stop dodging.

dhw: 2) Your all-good and all-knowing God knew in advance that his bugs would cause evil but he went ahead and created them,

DAVID: God knew of their secondary ability to produce evil not in His control, but the good they do outweigh the evil.

Your all-powerful, all-knowing God can’t control the evil he knew he was creating, but you think you can solve the problem of how an all-good God can create evil by telling us that there is more good than evil. A great way to solve a problem – by pretending it isn’t a problem.

dhw: and 3) your all-powerful God was powerless to stop their evil, though in another theory he wanted the evil as it presented a “challenge”.

DAVID: A side effect of evil is that it makes life more challenging is true.

Are you saying your all-good God actually wanted the evil, so that he could make life tougher for us and our fellow creatures? If so, why do you think he wanted to do that?

4) dhw: Your “humanized” God enjoys creation and is interested in his creations, but he could not possibly have designed evolution because he wanted to enjoy creating something that would interest him.

DAVID: Stop describing my God as ever acting in self-interest like your humanized God. My God is purely purposeful in designing His creations.

What does “purely” purposeful mean? See above re self-interest.

5) dhw: Your “humanized”, all-knowing God gave humans free will, so that they would produce results he could not expect, but he expected the results that they produced.

DAVID: What a contortion! What he expected is evil would appear.

And so he went ahead and created it, which hardly makes him all-good. But this reference concerned the fact that the unexpected is always more interesting that the expected (you tried to use TV writers as an analogy, but you didn’t know that many writers like myself do NOT know all the twists and turns in advance) – hence the argument for an unpredictable free-for-all evolution, which would be far more interesting for God than a predictable Garden of Eden which you said would bore him.

Centenarians' bugs

DAVID: Centenarian's bugs help define the true meaning of bacteria as good, not evil:

QUOTE: […] a clue to centenarians’ long lives may be in their guts. Microbes that produce unique bile acids in the intestines of 100-year-olds may keep inflammation and aging-related illness at bay.

DAVID: more evidence of how bacteria are here to help, not damage. A side effect is when they are in the wrong environment and cause illness.

The problem is the existence of evil, as created by a supposedly all-good God, whether through murderous microbes or free-willed humans, and you do not solve the problem by telling us to look only at all the good things.