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

by David Turell , Wednesday, September 13, 2023, 18:01 (227 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

The 99.9% loss came from God's evolution producing an evolved Earth with its current huge bush of life which is our food supply. See Privileged Plant entry today.

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

Not answered.

Answered many times before: God chose to evolve us. It was the method He felt He had to use as best available.

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.

dhw: 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?

Just that!!! Our words applied to God allegorically.

Evolution and theodicy

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.

dhw: 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!

"War, rape, and famine" are the result of evil humans, not God. The flood deaths in Libya from storm Dan are due to storm surge and a broken dam. All due to human error. Our warning systems here always prevent such a mess. None of this is God's fault.