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

by David Turell , Friday, September 29, 2023, 17:55 (211 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: My 'no sense' was meant to be derogatory. As your snowman complaint makes no sense to me!

dhw: If the bolded theory would make no sense to ID-ers, what is meant to be “derogatory”? What snowman complaint are you talking about? You have agreed over and over again that you cannot find a single reason why your God would deliberately design 99.9 out of 100 species which have no connection with what you believe to have been his one and only purpose. Hence your derogatory description of your senseless theory as messy, cumbersome and inefficient, and your statement that it makes sense only to God (i.e. not to you).

ID theory is that God designed evolution and every individual. Your weird complaint comes from not accepting the end of evolution in humans as evidence of God's intention from the beginning. Adler did it, I do it.

Early pre-humans

dhw: But if you put your two theories together, you have him senselessly creating 99.9% of life forms that had no relevance to his one and only purpose. Such messy inefficiency can hardly be said to fit in with other concepts of yours, such as his all-powerfulness and all-knowingness.

Same old simple answer. God chose to evolve us for His own, unknown to us, reasons. Accept it!!!

dhw: (taken from the “Feser” thread): The fact is, we both know exactly what you mean by all these terms. What we don’t know is whether they are applicable to your God or not.

DAVID: Thank you for the bold, finally.

dhw: It’s you have finally understood that it is not a matter of the terms having a different meaning for God, but of whether the terms – whose meaning is perfectly clear – can be applied to him. When you say you are certain he enjoys creating, you don’t think your God may have a different concept of enjoyment; the question is whether or not creating gives him pleasure. Similarly such terms as all-powerful or selfless are not open to different interpretations – we all know what they mean. So is he or is he not all-powerful and selfless? (See the Feser thread.)

I, like all believers, view God as all-powerful and selfless.

Evolution and theodicy

DAVID: I'm simply repeating scholarly conclusions about theodicy.

dhw: If the scholarly answer to the problem of evil is that evil is not worth discussing, I suggest you ignore it and start thinking for yourself.

DAVID: Thinking for myself first involves self-education in the subject.

dhw: You don’t seem to have got beyond the thought that the problem of theodicy is solved by pretending it isn’t a problem. […]

DAVID: No, I like recognizing proportionality of the problems you over-magnify.

dhw: There is no magnification. Evils such as war, murder, rape, famine, flood, disease all exist, and the ratio of good to bad does not explain how such evil can result from the deliberate work of an all-good God.

The bolded all can come from human evil: floods due to ill-kept dams in Libya; disease from poor sanitation and lack of providing for immunity-giving shots. Famine is poor planning by governments. An all-good God gave us free will to both create and solve problems.