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

by dhw, Thursday, September 14, 2023, 12:34 (226 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.

DAVID: 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.

That does not explain why your God “had to” or “chose to” design 99.9% of species irrelevant to his purpose.

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

So he could have used other methods, e.g. he could have designed us plus food directly instead of designing 99.9 species that had no connection with us plus food, but for reasons which make no sense to you or me, he felt he "had to" design them and then lose them (apparently relying on luck to get rid of them).

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?

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

Enjoy means to gain pleasure from something. Do you or do you not think your God gains pleasure from creating?

Reading God’s nature (Feser)

QUOTE: the skeptic can no more pretend that his position is neutral about them than the theist can.

An excellent insight which forms the very basis of agnosticism.

DAVID: note the comment about analogical use of words when describing God. I could use metaphorical in that same sense. I have used allegorical in the sense of hidden meaning. Adler tells us any definition of 'God' is extremely difficult to achieve. So we know what words mean in our level of existence, but we really do not know how they apply to God and His personality.

We don’t even know if God exists, let alone what attributes he does or doesn’t have. However, WE know what we mean when we use terms like enjoy, interested, all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing, and if you don’t think they mean what you think they mean, you should stop using them altogether. (More on Feser in the next post.)

Evolution and theodicy

dhw: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!

DAVID: "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.

As regards environmental catastrophes, you have never managed to sort out whether you think your God is responsible or not. (I’m not thinking of those caused by human error. There were environmental catastrophes long before sapiens came on the scene.) And of course humans cause the evils of war, murder and rape. But your God knew they would when, according to you, he gave them free will. So once again, how can all-knowing God deliberately create a system which he knows will result in evil and yet be all-good?

DAVID(transferred from “microbiome”): I've given you the current answers.

dhw: You’ve given me the following answers: 1) evil is such a minor matter that we don’t need to discuss it; 2) Your all-knowing God “had to” or “chose to” (you keep switching) design a system which he knew in advance would result in all the forms of evil we know, and he is all-good but actually wants to create evil because if he created an Eden, humans wouldn’t be able to invent “something else”.

DAVID: The bold is nonsense. Evil is a byproduct of God's works.

The bold refers to your statement that “an idealistic Eden would not push us to invent something else”. Again: If your God deliberately created a system which he knew would lead to evil, how can he be all-good? And why do you use such a term if it doesn’t mean what you mean but is “allegorical!” or “analogous” or “metaphorical”? And if your God is all-powerful, why do you think he "had to" design something he didn't want to design?