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

by dhw, Monday, October 09, 2023, 11:15 (201 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Same weird psychoanalysis of my mind. Creating humans and their food supply by evolution is what happened. Assuming God did it is my belief, which means it makes perfect sense to me if not to you.

dhw: But according to your weird theory, creating humans plus food was his one and only purpose, and so he deliberately created and then had to get rid of 99.9 out of 100 species which had no connection with his one and only purpose. The existence and extinction of what you think were unnecessary species is also “what happened”, and you cannot think of a single reason why he would choose what you call such a messy, cumbersome and inefficient method to achieve his one and only purpose. That is why you simply leave it out of your replies in an endless attempt to dodge the fact that you admit your combination of theories makes no sense even to you.

DAVID: Same old cook-booked response. Let's move on.

It is the same old response to your continued efforts to dodge the implications of your theory of evolution: you simply leave out those sections which do not make sense. Of course you want to move on! But until you acknowledge the illogicality and hence the extreme unlikelihood of your combined theories, you will remain immobile.

Theodicy

dhw: please tell us how your God can conceive of evil and knowingly build it into the system which, as first cause, he created out of himself, and yet be all-good.

DAVID: The problem for God is in producing good, evil appears. To quote the old song: you can't have one without the other. I've asked you to supply a satisfactory alternate system and you couldn't.

You asked me what my God would produce in a system with no evil, and I responded: “a garden of Eden […] in which all life forms, including humans, live at peace with one another, and even in communion with their God.” However, this is totally irrelevant to the question posed by theodicy. There is no “problem for God” if, being all-powerful, he created the system he wanted to create. The problem is for people like you, who insist that your God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good etc., and then find that the history of life on Earth does not support your theories. 1) Why would an all-powerful God who has only one purpose proceed to design 100 species and then find he must eliminate 99 of them because they are unnecessary for his purpose? 2) How can a first-cause, all-good God conceive of evil and deliberately design a system which he knows will produce evil?