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

by dhw, Saturday, October 14, 2023, 10:19 (196 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: So why did your all-powerful God have to design and then cull the unnecessary 99.9%?

DAVID: God's decision for His own, unknown reasons, which I don't care or need to know.

So you agree that they were unnecessary, and you have no idea why he would have created them. But now comes the next self-contradiction:

DAVID: They are all connected. This the fallacy in your thinking.

Connected to what? Your theory is and always has been that your God’s one and only purpose from the very beginning was to design us and our food, but he proceeded to design 99.9 out of 100 species that were NOT connected to us or our food, and you have no idea why he would use such a messy, cumbersome and inefficient method (your words).

DAVID: That is how evolution works. Your problem is wondering why God chose such a cumbersome way to achieve his goals. It is my problem also, because I don’t know God’s reasoning either.

Thank you for once again acknowledging that the 99.9% were NOT connected, and you can’t make sense of your theory either.

dhw: We only know of one evolution of life. You make it sound as if your all-powerful God was subject to some kind of law beyond his control: “If thou wishest to design humans plus food, thou must first design 99.9 out of 100 species that have no connection with humans plus food.” Yes, you have a problem, and it’s not helped by your refusal to believe that your senseless theory might be wrong.

DAVID: Evolve has only one implication: gradual change from one form to a different form. In living evolution it is generaly a better one.

I have no idea what point you are trying to make here. Darwin’s gradualism is highly suspect, and you yourself are convinced that some species even came into existence with no precursors at all. In any case, this has nothing to do with the limitations you impose on your all-powerful God, who you normally tell us is perfectly capable of designing species directly but who, for reasons unknown, imposed on himself a method which involved designing and culling 99.9 out of 100 species he didn’t want to design.

DAVID: It is a continuous process from simple to complex forms. Your troubled complaint comes from fallacious reasoning.

There is no doubt that the process led from simple to complex, but that does not mean every single species that ever lived went from simple to complex, or had to be specially designed and culled in order for your God to specially design humans plus food. Fallacious reasoning is your speciality, which is why you always end up pretending your illogical theories were “God’s decision for his own, unknown reasons”.

Theodicy

There is no point in my repeating the detailed responses I gave you yesterday, since you have chosen to ignore them all. I will simply cover the final exchange:

dhw: But I calmly point out to you that all the above arguments are irrelevant to the problem of theodicy, which is not a question of proving God’s existence, or of how much evil there is in the world, or of what alternatives I can offer. The question concerns the nature of God: if, as first cause – i.e. the source of all the realities we know – he knowingly invented a system which produced evil, how can he be all-good? [Please keep this bold in mind throughout all that follows.]

DAVID: You fail to accept the point; this is the only system of life that can work.

Firstly, how do you know? It is the only system of life that we have.

DAVID: How to create life has limits, which means an all-good God could only find this one system and therefore He is limited in this area, as we humans analyze it.

Secondly, any limitation you impose on God by definition contradicts the claim that he is all-powerful. An all-powerful God would create what he wants to create. This fits in nicely with your challenge theory, but that means he deliberately creates evil out of himself, so how can he be all-good? Thirdly, I agree that most of what we humans regard as “evil” is caused by our own behaviour (e.g. war, rape, murder). However, your God is the first cause of EVERYTHING, and you insist that he is all-knowing. So he KNEW about evil before we even arrived, and he KNEW we would produce war, murder, rape etc. How could he have known about something even before he had made it exist? You will no doubt proudly announce that he knew all about good, because he is all-good. But how can he be all-good if he and he alone knew about evil, and then proceeded knowingly to create a system which produced the evil only he knew about?