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

by dhw, Tuesday, October 24, 2023, 12:37 (186 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your "if God" experiments, uses a free-for-all, but you don't recognize how weak you make your imagined God. An all-powerful God directly creates whatever He wishes directly, not through your very weak methods imposed on Him.

dhw: According to you, your God’s one and only wish was to create sapiens plus food, but instead of creating us directly, he created and had to cull 99.9 species out of 100 which had no connection with us. You have called his method messy, cumbersome and inefficient. Now you are calling it weak, but you are telling me that a God who wishes to experiment and to find out the potential of his invention is weak because he experiments and finds out the potential of his invention. […]

DAVID: A really powerful all-knowing purposeful God has no need for experimentation as He knows full well how to achieve His purposes.

If your all-powerful, all-knowing, purposeful God would “directly create whatever he wishes directly”, and his only purpose was to design us and our food, why would he directly design and then have to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his one and only purpose? Do you call that ”direct” creation? Welcome to Wonderland.

DAVID: Yes, you are in Alice in Wonderland. A teleological thought process explains God's role and destroys your Darwinism approach which cannot allow a purposeful evolutionary approach as anathema to chance.

Our discussion is based on your premise that God exists and is responsible for evolution. A God who experiments or deliberately creates a free-for-all has nothing whatsoever to do with Darwin’s theory, so please stop using Darwin as an excuse for dodging your self-contradictions. You keep agreeing that you have no idea why your God would use your messy, cumbersome, inefficient and now “weak” method to achieve the purpose you impose on him. And yet you continue to argue that this version is really powerful, whereas a God who does precisely what he wants to do (experiment, discover, enjoy new creations) is weak. I guess part of being in Wonderland is not believing you’re in Wonderland!

Theodicy

DAVID: I had independently arrived at proportionality before reading the theodicy opinions which confirmed my view.

dhw: And no doubt you have independently arrived at the conclusion that you had better ignore the above and simply go on pretending that the problem of theodicy is solved by pretending that there is no problem.

DAVID: Do you remember what you read? I raised the theodicy issue years ago specifically to discuss the problem.

How does that justify your pretence that the problem is solved by pretending there is no problem?

dhw: Do you regard inefficiency as less namby-pamby than successful experimentation?

DAVID: Namby-pamby refers to a weak God who gives up direct control and HOPES the process achieves His wished for goal.

dhw: In one of your theodicy theories, your God has no control over the evil “by-products” of the system he has invented. How weak and namby-pamby is that?

DAVID: God has accepted the byproducts of His good works as necessaary.

So your all-powerful God has accepted that he must give up direct control (= weak). And since according to you he hates evil, presumably (since he has given us free will) part of his goal is to eliminate the evil he hates – i.e. he HOPES the process will achieve his wished-for goal. Congratulations, your God has now achieved namby-pamby status, as bolded above.

dhw: If "my God" wants to experiment or wants to create a free-for-all, and proceeds to experiment or to create a free-for-all, how does that come to mean he is not all-powerful?

DAVID: God created a universe from Himself. Developed the perfect planet for life and then invented life. Then suddenly, in your version, He has to experiment or gives over control to a free-for-all so He can be entertained by unexpected results. Dual/split personalities is the weird result.

dhw: No split at all. He doesn’t “have to” experiment in any of my versions. He creates life because he wants to enjoy creating new things through experimenting or through the same free-for-all that you envisage with your out-of-control bugs and your human free will. The only split personality that has emerged from our discussions is your all-powerful God who directly creates what he wants to create, except that he doesn’t, and your first-cause, all-good God who creates evil out of himself.

DAVID: The good bugs must be free of action while under instructions for life to work. God found this the only way possible. We produce evil, not God.

See above. Please understand that I’m not accusing God of waging war or committing murder or rape. I’m merely pointing out that your first-cause designer who created all life out of himself, and who deliberately designed a life form which he knew would wage war, or commit murder or rape – none of which ever existed before he designed the life form – can hardly be all-good.