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

by David Turell , Sunday, October 15, 2023, 17:30 (195 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: 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.

dhw: Correct. But that does not mean that every simple and every complex form was specially designed by your God for the sole purpose of designing sapiens plus food.

That is my belief.

DAVID: What disappears are all the early discarded forms. The small early group becomes an enormous present group.

Correct. What disappears is what disappears. According to your statistics, 99.9% were discarded, and 0.1% became the present group.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: It’s not “my” 99.9% loss, and your illogical theory is not God’s problem. All life is part of life’s history, triangle or no triangle, and the problem you can’t solve is why your God would have designed a triangle, 99.9% of whose area was, according to you, unnecessary because all he really wanted to design was the 0.1%. What “weird contention” are you talking about? You have merely repeated the same old problem, which arises from an illogical combination of theories that makes no sense even to you.

It is a problem for you, not me. If evolution occurred, and with God in charge, it is logical to assume God chose this system of creation. Perfectly sensible. My explanation of the 99.9% clearly defines your distortion of the statistics. Your problem is your human brain, not thinking at God's level, complains of God's method and thinks He should have done it differently. You questioned years ago, why not direct creation, since God had demonstrated the ability within evolution.

Theodicy

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.

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

dhw: What do you mean by “available”? If your God is first cause, he was not presented with facts beyond his control. He invented them all. I can accept, however, that if he is all- powerful, this was the system he wanted to create. But that means he wanted to create a system which he knew would produce evil. How does that make him all-good?

Same answer: His good works came with side effects beyond His controls. As for the system of life, God knew all the 'available' choices He thought of and picked the best.

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?

Not answered.

Fully answered in the past. The evil did not come directly from God in all instances.

dhw: 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. […] 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?

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

dhw: Not simple at all. You have not answered the bold. An all-powerful God would only create a system out of his control if he wanted to, and an all-knowing God would have known all about evil before he produced the system which in turn produced it. How could he know all about evil and deliberately produce a system which he knew would produce evil if he is all-good?

Theism recognizes the theodicy problem. God knew evil would appear, secondhand. The good far outweighed the evil.

dhw: An added bonus here concerns your dotty theory of evolution. If your God, for whatever reason, was quite happy to lose control of the system that produced evil, then he might have been happy to lose control of evolution itself (giving life forms the intelligence with which to create their own designs) – a theory which would automatically solve the problem you have created for yourself by making him design 99.9% of species irrelevant to his purpose.

So, if the organisms produce their own next species that makeup the 99.9% loss, how does that solve the problem of the loss? They are following God-given plans of design!!