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

by David Turell , Sunday, October 01, 2023, 17:06 (209 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: God obviously wanted humans whom He knew would create evil.

dhw: Please tell us why he wanted the evil he knew humans would create.

God did not want the evil humans create. But He wished to create us while accepting that result. Humans also had the ability fight and control evil.

DAVID: If God created, it is what God wanted to create, no reasons given. We humans assume God had reasons. Perhaps God is simply reasonless purpose.

dhw: So your God wanted to create evil, but although you never cease to tell us how purposeful he is, he may have had a purposeless purpose for doing so.

DAVID: Humans were His purpose. God is never purposeless except in your mind.

dhw: Please tell us what you think was your purposeful God's purpose in creating humans.

To have a thoughtful organism who might study God's purposes.

DAVID: Your search for 'evidence' pollutes your thinking. The only evidence is our reality. God, as a theoretical personage, is in the eye of the beholder. In that context God hates evil, as I do.

dhw: A theoretical personage whose nature is “in the eye of the beholder” leaves it open to all of us to load him with whatever characteristics we like, and so neither you nor Adler nor the rabbis nor the theologians have any authority to tell us how to think about him.

No comment from you.

There are agreed upon characteristics among the accepted experts in the theological theories.

dhw: But we can also test the reasonableness of different views. For instance, as above: if he’s all-powerful, he must have created what he wanted to create, so why did he want to create a world of good and evil if he hates evil? Or if he is the first cause of all things, and created a system which would result in evil as well as good, how can he be all-good?

DAVID: It is all the way you look at balance. I see life for us as 99% good. God's 'system' is human beings who create their own evil, which God expects them to control.

dhw: How you see life is irrelevant to the question of how and why an all-good God can create a system he knows will produce evil.

DAVID: Evil is a human concept.

dhw: Then so is good. How come your all-knowing God knew nothing about good and evil before he designed the humans who produced both?

DAVID: Our concepts are well known to God.

dhw: If he is the all-knowing first cause, then all concepts were known to him before they were known to us.

Of course, God knew all in advance of our thinking. Our discussions come from a 50,000-year- old language development in a 315,000-old God-given brain.