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

by dhw, Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 13:44 (199 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God evolved us knowing He would have a loss of 99.9% of the forms.

dhw: But according to you he deliberately designed 99.9 out of 100 species, knowing that they were unnecessary and he would have to get rid of them (or rely on luck to get rid of them). This method is so messy, cumbersome and inefficient (your words) that even you can’t think of any reason why he would use it – as you acknowledge next:

DAVID: God chose this method for His own reasons. Reasons we do not HAVE to know although you demand them. What sections are left out??

dhw: It is your baseless assumption that he chose this messy, cumbersome and inefficient method for which you cannot find a single reason, so how can you say your combined theories make perfect sense although even you can’t find an explanation?

DAVID: Not baseless. We are debating about a God-produced evolution. What happened are His Works. The explanation is simple. God chose to evolve the whole current bush of life, which includes us, and our food supply, and we are made/prepared to be dominant.

You never stop dodging. If God exists, yes, he produced evolution. According to you, he chose to evolve (by which you mean individually design) countless bushes of life, 99.9% of which had no connection with us or our bush. You can’t think of a single reason why he would have done so, because you believe that we plus our food were his one and only purpose from the very beginning.

dhw: [...] he deliberately designed them, knowing that they were unnecessary and he would have to get rid of them. Talk about messy, cumbersome and inefficient!

DAVID: Not unnecessary but required for a culling process which creates advancing evolution.

So 99.9% of species that had no connection with us and our food had to be designed and killed, because he couldn’t have designed us without first designing and killing them (or leaving it to chance to kill them – you can never quite make up your mind about that). How does killing species create anything?

Theodicy

dhw How can a first-cause, all-good God conceive of evil and deliberately design a system which he knows will produce evil?

DAVID: We have God-given free will. To be productive we need free will. Evil is a by-product, not God's.

I’m glad you acknowledge that productivity requires free will. I use the same argument in support of the theory of autonomous cellular intelligence, which would solve all the problems surrounding your unnecessary 99.9% of species. In the context of theodicy, however, there is no escaping the fact that your first-cause, all-powerful, all-knowing version of God knew in advance that he was creating a system which would produce evil. I don’t have a problem with that. It only becomes a problem if you insist that your God is all-good.

A Christian reply to theodicy:

dhw: There are good arguments against the existence of God, but evil is not one of them! In between, Jill does say “the being that is the best explanation for the facts above is not necessarily the omnipotent, omni-benevolent God that the problem of evil is directed at.” But this is never developed.

DAVID: It doesn't have to be developed as it concerns a belief in God.

Again:Theodicy concerns the belief that God is all-good. It does not question his existence.

dhw: There is no mention of your daft “proportionality” argument,

DAVID: Yes, in the article: "Jill: Well, I can see how suffering sometimes can make us stronger, but really, I wonder whether the amount and horrific nature of the evil in this world is compatible with a benevolent God or character formation. Just consider any of the recent mind-numbing murders in the news, or the Holocaust.

"Dr. Shepherd: So it comes down to a matter of the amount? I think it is at least possible that no better balance of good and evil is feasible for God among all the possible worlds that contain free creatures. (David’s bold)

Thank you. For some reason this was not quoted by you in the version you presented to us. You are right, then, and like yourself, Dr Shepherd (and to a lesser degree Jill too) misses the whole point of theodicy. It already assumes God’s existence. If we also assume human free will and take the Holocaust as an example, of course Hitler & Co were responsible for it. Amount is irrelevant. Theodicy asks how your all-knowing God can know he’s designing a system that will lead to the Holocaust and yet at the same time be all-good. If you say he wanted to challenge us, then he created evil deliberately. How does that make him all-good? If he hates evil (and therefore would not have wanted it but couldn’t avoid its production), how does that make him all-powerful? Perhaps this is why you’re so desperate to forget your earlier certainty that he enjoys creating and is interested in his creations. The enjoyment of creating the system, knowing that the Holocaust was coming, and watching it with interest is hard to reconcile with the concept of an all-good God.