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

by dhw, Monday, October 30, 2023, 11:05 (180 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What you wish explained cannot be explained! The reasons in God's mind are hidden to us. We can only analyze what God produced. He produced us!

dhw: And according to you, we and our food were his one and only purpose, but he also deliberately produced and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species which had no connection with us and our food, and you cannot explain why!

DAVID: Continuously asking for God's reasoning to use evolution is nonsense!

If God exists, then of course he invented and used evolution. But that does not mean his only goal was to design us and our food, and it does not explain why, being all-knowing and all-powerful, he would have designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with the only ones he wanted. Stop dodging!

dhw: What analysis tells you that your God’s only purpose was us and therefore he had to design 99.9 species out of 100 that had nothing to do with us?

DAVID: God's own analysis! Revealed by Raup.

Does Raup also tell us when and where God revealed to him that his only purpose was us and therefore he had to design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had nothing to do with us?

dhw: If God exists, he designed evolution. According to you “he directly creates what he wishes directly”. He did not create us directly, but for reasons you can’t explain, he also directly created 99.9 species that had no connection with us. In your own words: ““We do not know why God chose to evolve us. dhw is correct. Why not direct creation?”

DAVID: All this palaver puzzling over God's decision to evolve us. It is starting with simple forms and bit by bit ending up with today's complexity in the bush of life.

A correct description of the history of evolution, and a blatant dodge of the fact that your combined theories of your God’s purpose and method make no sense to you, as is abundantly clear from your two bolded statements above.

DAVID: ...any form of enjoyments or interests are secondary events, not primary purposes.

dhw: […] Enjoyment and interest are not “events”, and if you do something because you enjoy doing it and you want to create something interesting to watch, then enjoyment and interest are a purpose. Please tell us his “primary purpose” in designing the unnecessary 99.9 species, and his “primary purpose” for designing us and our food.

DAVID: It is all one purpose, evolve humans from simple forms in stages requiring 99.9% loss along the way.

His purpose for specially designing and culling 99.9 out of 100 unnecessary species was to design one species, and that is supposed to make sense. And his purpose for designing us plus our food was…?

Theodicy

DAVID: I accept God's works warts and all. […]

dhw: Your acceptance is irrelevant to the problem of theodicy.

dhw: I don’t understand why an all-powerful God, who according to you “directly creates whatever he wishes directly”, has to accept the evil which he hates, and which as first cause he and he alone has produced, whether directly (as a challenge to us humans) or indirectly (because he was powerless to prevent it). Warts are blemishes or imperfections. How can a designer deliberately or accidentally produce evil imperfections but still be regarded as all-powerful, all-good and perfect?

DAVID: I've answered before; the good greatly outweighs the secondary evil which results. Translated: you can't have one without the other.

dhw: Proportionality does not explain the existence of evil. If you can’t have one without the other, then quite clearly your God can’t be all good. Let us not forget that as first cause he is supposed to have created all of our reality out of himself. There was no such thing as evil until he produced it.

[No need for me to repeat the biblical command to kill all non-believers, since neither of us accepts the Bible as “the word of God”.]

DAVID: What GOOD God produced secondarily produced evil. God allowed evil to appear because there was no other alternative. Proportionality is a way to accept it.

Your all-powerful, all-knowing God was powerless to prevent evil, and yet he “directly creates what he wishes to create”, and in one of your theories he even invents evil as a challenge to humans. As first cause, he created everything out of himself, so how could he “allow evil to appear” if he was nothing but good? We don’t need proportionality to “accept” evil. Every war, murder and rape confirms that evil exists, and theodicy asks us to explain it, not accept it.