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

by David Turell , Saturday, October 14, 2023, 17:22 (196 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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.

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

I did not acknowledge your weird contention. The process of evolution is not your distorted version. Early simple forms are gradually turned into more complex forms step by step. What disappears are all the early discarded forms. The small early group becomes an enormous present group. Think of it as a triangle standing on its tip. What survives is the opposite side, actually much larger than the tip. Your 99.9% loss is the area of the triangle. Why God chose this method is God's problem, not ours.

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

dhw: 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”.

Accepting God's decisions are no illogical.

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.

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

It is the system an all-knowing God produced, which means it is the best one available:

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.

dhw: 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?

Same simple answer: all the good He created had evil as byproducts not under His control.