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

by dhw, Sunday, November 12, 2023, 08:18 (167 days ago) @ David Turell

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?

dhw: 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: 'Round and 'round we go. Your question is unanswerable as to God's reasons. So we are left with God CHOSE to evolve us. I'm comfortable with that response. You are not.

We go round and round because your combined theories as bolded above make no sense even to you, but you refuse to consider the possibility that one or both might be wrong.

dhw: 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: Humans and our food are the remaining 0.1% survivors. The 99.9% are ancestors. […]

I specifically used the term “direct ancestors of us and our food”. Bolded above, you don’t know why he designed 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us and our food (as you have agreed throughout all the years of this discussion), and a minute later you claim they were all direct ancestors of us and our food! And we shouldn't forget that according to you, the majority of our direct ancestors and those of other animals now in existence were designed by your God without any precursors during the Cambrian period, which leaves us with pre-Cambrian life forms stretching back around 3000,000,000 years. Please stop shooting yourself in the foot.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: The reasons you offered created a very humanized God whose main purpose was to enjoy Himself, watching what might be created since He was not in full control.

In two of them he was experimenting – but that doesn’t matter. I don’t mind you rejecting them. My objection is to your constant insistence that your completely illogical theory makes sense to you, although you can’t find any reason why your God would act in the manner or for the purpose you impose on him.

DAVID: I'm happy because I don't need God's reasoning and I'm grateful for God's gifts to us.

Your happiness and gratitude do not contribute one iota of reason to your theories. You could be just as happy and grateful without them.

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.

dhw: 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.
DAVID: I was an agnostic until I discovered the true facts leading to a conclusion, beyond a reasonable doubt, God exists. Sorry you didn't .

You have of course missed the point. Your inability to answer the fundamental question of theodicy after considering all the known facts, as well as your willingness to live with your ignorance, mirrors that of the agnostic’s approach to the fundamental question of God’s existence.