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

by dhw, Wednesday, September 13, 2023, 11:15 (435 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] Extinctions are a matter of history, but not of some unknown law. If your all-powerful God’s one and only purpose was to design us plus food, it doesn’t make the slightest difference whether 99.9% or 89.9% or even 50% of his designs were irrelevant to his purpose; bbbyou admit that you still can’t find any reason why he “had to” design species that had no connection with his purpose.bbb Your theory makes no sense to you, so stop dodging.

DAVID: Your entirely false premise ignores the facts of present life: evolution produced a vast diversity of life that provides our food for over 8+ billion humans with an increasing population. God's works studied teleologically are fully comprehensible. That is something you do not even entertain.

What false premise? I have reproduced your theory. According to you and Raup, only 0.1% of evolution produced us and our food, but you insist that your God specially designed the other irrelevant 99.9% and you don’t know why. In other words, if you study your God’s works, telelology makes the 99.9% incomprehensible! However, when I offer you different purposes for his works, you refuse to “entertain” them.

dhw: You can’t even decide if he “had to” or “chose to” use the method you impose on him.

Not answered.

DAVID: God is selfless so when we think He enjoys, etc., it must be in an allegorical sense as Adler advises.

dhw: When you told us you were sure your God enjoyed creating and was interested in his creations, what did you mean by the words “enjoy” and “interested”? And please tell us the allegorical meaning of “selfless”.

DAVID: Those words in our language have meanings to us. God is in our imagination as a pure state of being and our words are insufficient to describe Him.

I presume you know what you mean when you say your God is “selfless”. What did you mean when you said you were sure he “enjoyed” creating and was “interested” in his creations?

Evolution and theodicy

DAVID: My views of God are mine alone.

dhw: Then stop pretending that theists agree with your explanation!

DAVID: My views of theodicy are theists published views. Stop mixing two subjects!!

dhw: I asked if theists “were as happy as you” with your view (which I bolded) that your God “knew in advance that his inventions would result in war, murder, rape, floods, famines and diseases, but went ahead and was powerless to prevent all the suffering these evils have caused.” You said yes.

DAVID: Tell us of any theists who agree with your God proposals.

It’s you who claimed that theists agreed with you, presumably thinking that this would somehow invalidate my arguments, but then you said that your theories were yours alone! I couldn’t care less if theists agree or don’t agree with my theories. Why can’t you just stick to the arguments?

dhw: One of your dodges is to minimize the extent of evil, as if that solved the problem of theodicy. Millions of people suffer from the effects of war, murder, famines, floods, diseases (including cancer) etc., but your answer to the question how/why an all-good God could create such evils is that we shouldn’t take any notice of them, because God created lots more good than bad. Stop dodging.

DAVID: Your usual non-answer to facts: "Cancers are the result of mistakes as cell split in mitosis, a very complicated process with many events occurring all at once, under tight controls. Our bodies cells do this trillions of times a day, which means cancer is actually a very rare outcome." You are crying over an additive result. I don't like cancer any more than you do, but my view is much more reasonable.

I am not disputing your facts. Theodicy is not concerned with statistics, and cancer is only one of countless diseases and other “evils” such as war, murder, rape, famine, flood…The question you are so desperate to dodge with your statistics is why/how an all-good God could create a system resulting in evil. The comparative rarity of cancer does not answer the question, so please stop dodging!