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

by dhw, Saturday, September 30, 2023, 08:30 (210 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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).

DAVID: 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.

And still you go on ignoring the core feature of your theory, bolded above, which you yourself cannot explain, and which you admitted would make no sense to your fellow ID-ers.

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

And still you dodge! Once more: The absurdity of your theory lies in your belief that your all-powerful God deliberately designed 99.9 out 100 species which had no relevance to us and our food, although you insist that we and our food were his only purpose from the beginning. And you cannot think of any reason why he might have done so.

dhw: […] 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.)

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

And in the past you have expressed certainty that your God enjoys creating and is interested in his creations and probably has thought processes and emotions in common with us. We are fortunately no longer bogged down by the silly argument that these terms are “allegorical” or “metaphorical”, since you agree that we know what they mean and the question is simply whether these descriptions do or do not apply to your God. If you believe that he takes pleasure in creating, how can he possibly do so without a self which is conscious of the enjoyment? If he is all-powerful, how can he possibly be incapable of preventing the evil that apparently he hates?

Evolution and theodicy

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.

DAVID: 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.

I’m not denying that a lot of evil is caused by humans, including war, murder, rape and your other examples, including your later one of cholera. As usual, you merely skate over the problem: if God is the first cause and creator of all life, then there was no such thing as evil before he invented the system which produced it. If he is all-knowing, he must have known what evil was before he deliberately created the system that produced it, so how can he be all-good?

DAVID (on the “Feser” thread): Our evil is not God's fault as you imply. His all-good action gave us free will which results in a much more fulfilling life for us.

dhw: I am not questioning the value of free will (if we have it). The question, for the umpteenth time, is how an all-good God can conceive of and create the opportunity for evil.

DAVID: Humans were given that opportunity. You have circled back to wanting life in a Garden of Eden for humanity.

I don’t want a Garden of Eden. I’m asking how an all-good God can create evil if he is the first cause of everything. Stop dodging!

(More of the same on the “Feser” thread)