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

by David Turell , Wednesday, August 16, 2023, 17:51 (255 days ago) @ dhw

Again I have edited the post in order to condense the arguments.

DAVID: Our food is the diversity of life on Earth which must be created by evolving an enormous bush of life supported by the mechanism of diverse, interrelated ecosystems. All of this shows purposes of God's creationism to support human's existence.

dhw: ALL forms of life depend on diverse interrelated ecosystems, and these come and go as forms of life appear and disappear. Two days ago:
dhw: Past ecosystems were for the past, present ecosystems are for the present.

DAVID: The bold is correct.

dhw: So please stop pretending that this means your God individually created every past ecosystem in order to “support human’s existence”.

The current need of the eight-plus billion human population requires all ecosystems for food. Those systems were developed in the past to become the present systems. Pure logic.

DAVID: My 'mirror' of current theology is based on the 'attributes of God' and the teachings of ID.

dhw: So where among the attributes of God and the teachings of ID have you found that your God’s “messy, cumbersome, inefficient” (your description) method of design, as bolded above, arose from the fact that his sole purpose was to design us and our food, but in order to do so he had to design 99 out of 100 life forms that had no connection with us and our food? You have told us that ID does not even discuss theodicy. Please tell us which religion or list of God’s attributes includes your theory that your all-powerful God was powerless to prevent the diseases caused by his otherwise good bacteria and viruses, and that your all-good, all-knowing God knew in advance that by giving humans free will, he would be producing war, murder, rape etc. but still went ahead with his invention.

All of the theodicy essays I found use the Dayenu approach, which I have presented here.

dhw: Why do you describe a God who wants to create “novelties”, i.e. life forms which never existed before, and succeeds in doing so, as “clueless”?

DAVID: Answered above as vital food supply [dhw: dealt with above] and both forms of God created novelties as part of advancing evolution. Your clueless God is the one who experiments, noting that experimenting implies no knowledge of the endpoint.

dhw: In two of my theistic alternatives, God wants to discover all the possible variations that can be produced by his invention, because – in your own words – he enjoys creating and is interested in his creations. He does and gets precisely what he wants to do and get. Why is this “clueless”? I’d have thought the term was far more appropriate for a God who knows what he wants, but for unknown reasons makes himself design 99 out of 100 life forms that he doesn’t want.

The rest of your post repeats the same dodges and arguments.

Anyone who experiments is looking for an answer to his question. Experimentation finds his answer. An experimenting God is clueless just like my human example.