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

by David Turell , Friday, November 10, 2023, 17:57 (168 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Same as with the complexity of biochemistry, but our disagreement on this thread concerns your God’s purpose and method, not his existence.

Of course, we disagree about God's purpose: we agree He ran an evolutionary process with humans as an endpoint. With that result why can't that be His purpose?

DAVID: The bold, I've added, is a gross misinterpretation of Raup. The 0.1% living today are the result of 99.9% that ever lived becoming extinct in the process. The 0.1% now includes 8+ billion humans and their food sources.

dhw: They are not the result of 99.9% becoming extinct! They are the product of the 0.1% that survived, and the question you never stop dodging is why your all-powerful God would have specially designed and then had to cull the 99.9% if all he ever wanted to design was the 0.1%.

Same refrain from you. I don't read God's mind. God evolved us for His own reasons.

DAVID: Each existing species can be traced back in time to their origin. The original bacterial species are still here, and we trace every species back to them.

dhw: Correct. We trace every existing species back to the 0.1%, and you admit that you have no idea why your all-powerful God would have deliberately designed the 99.9% which had no connection with the one and only purpose you impose on him. Stop dodging!

We don't trace backward to the 0.1%!! We and our food are the existing 0.1%. In tracing back to bacteria, we find the missing extinct 99.9%.

Humans plus food

dhw: How can it [the term “humans plus food”] possibly be derisive? […] Please find one quote in which you think I’ve used the words derisively.

You quoted an exchange in which I didn’t even mention those words, let alone say anything derisive. Now all you can do is respond to the content!

DAVID: What was required were the lines that arrived at the present.
And later:
DAVID: In one weird statement you make the process of evolution disappear!!! What is here now are the necessary species for our food and us. 0.1% of all that previously lived to evolve them.

dhw: And the rest were not required if we and our food were your God’s one and only purpose, so why do you think he would have bothered to design them? Your combined theories make no sense! The process of evolution does not disappear if God did NOT deliberately design the 99.9%, or if he designed the 99.9% for a different purpose than the one you impose on him, but you are so firmly stuck with your preconceived ideas that you cannot imagine they might be wrong.

Your weird math approach to evolution refuses to recognize what God did. God evolved us and food from bacteria. It required 3.5+ billon years with a loss of 99.9% now extinct. The current endpoint is the only evidence of purpose we have. Your preconceived ideas are creating a confusion in your mind. Live with current facts, accepting that God is not a fact.

Theodicy

dhw: Your all-knowing God produced the system which he knew would lead to war, murder, rape etc. Your all-powerful God only creates what he wants to create, so he must have wanted to create freewill humans and bacteria and viruses and NOT wanted to control them. No problem. Leibniz may be right. But none of this answers the question posed by theodicy: how can the first-cause creator of all things have deliberately and knowingly created evil and yet be all-good?

DAVID: Believers consider God all-good. We fully understand human evil is secondhand to God giving us free will. There are secondhand mistakes made by proteins, for which God put in editing systems. Required good bacteria and viruses occasionally end up in the wrong place, again, a secondhand effect. We happily live with it.

dhw: Same dodging technique as above, with your dislocated theories about evolution. The fact that believers believe and that you happily live with it, and that evil is produced by humans and bacteria and viruses, does not explain how your first-cause, all-knowing God can deliberately create out of himself a system which he knows will produce evil, and yet at the same time be all-good. Evil did not exist until he knowingly and deliberately created the system that produced it!

True, and live with it. We have covered all factual considerations.