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

by dhw, Saturday, November 11, 2023, 08:16 (168 days ago) @ David Turell

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

DAVID: 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?

More dodging! It can be his purpose, but then as usual you have left out the problem that if we and our food were, as you claim, his one and only purpose, why would he have designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his purpose (us and our food?)

DAVID: […] 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 still you go on dodging the bolded question.

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

The bolded question is not why he evolved us but why, if we were his only purpose, he specially designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us. Stop dodging!

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!

DAVID: 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%.
Followed by:
DAVID: What is here now are the necessary species for our food and us. 1% of all that previously lived to evolve them.

In view of your recent vacillations and obfuscations, please give me a straight answer: do you believe that 99.9% of extinct species were the direct ancestors of us and our food, or that we humans and our food are directly descended from 0.1% of extinct species?

DAVID: 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.

The current endpoint is NOT the only evidence of purpose! There are 99.9 out of 100 extinct species which for years now you have been saying your purposeful God designed but for which with your dislocated theories you cannot find a purpose! I have offered you three alternative theories, all of which denote purpose for the 99.9, and you have accepted that they are all logical. But they conflict with your preconceived ideas, so those are what you stick to. By all means reject the three alternatives, but please don’t pretend that your combined theories make any sense, even to you, since all you can come up with is that God must have his reasons though you can't imagine what they might be.

Theodicy

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!

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

You raised the subject, and you have no answer to the question theodicy poses, so your answer is to live with it. You'd make a good agnostic.