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

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 11, 2023, 18:12 (199 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

If all current branches help to fill out our food supply, why do you see no connection?

dhw: 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?

No one killed anything! A failure to survive, called bad luck by Raup, resulted in new advanced species appearing, a process called evolution. Each advance of complexity led to our present bush of life.

Theodicy

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

dhw: 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.

An all-good God had to allow evil if He granted us free will. Good bacteria and viruses are necessary for ecosystems. Yes, they get in bad places, because they have to act independently of any controls.

A Christian reply to theodicy:

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.

Of course, it is right to assume God enjoys creating, because that was His intention. But we are saddled with the problem of not knowing just how the word 'enjoy' actually relates to God. As for being 'interested', the same thinking applies. As for not quoting all of an article, there is not room as Neil designed it. I have to make choices. That is why I give the website address for full review.