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

by dhw, Sunday, December 03, 2023, 12:05 (354 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I am challenging your theistic interpretation of life’s history, and it is NOT a fact that even if your God exists, (a) his one and only purpose was to produce us, and b) he designed every species individually. The combination of these two theories makes no sense, as it has your all-powerful, all-purposeful God individually designing and then culling 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his one and only purpose. But you don’t care if it makes no sense. You simply assume that your illogical theory is the only possible truth, and you leave it to God to explain the mess you have imposed on him.

DAVID: From my side it makes perfect sense. I simply view a designing God who wished to produce humans, a perfect fit with the historical result of evolution.

But you don’t keep it simple. You insist that he designed and then had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with humans (plus food), and you cannot think of a single reason why he would have done so. Stop dodging!

DAVID: I don't need God's reasoning for His use of an evolutionary system. The imperfections are really in our weak human reasoning about God's intentions and methods.

dhw: Please speak for yourself. It is your own weak human reasoning that has conjured up the messy imperfections. The evolutionary system we both acknowledge can be explained in a manner that relieves God of the messy, cumbersome, inefficient image you impose on him.

DAVID: I still feel evolution was a messy way to produce us.

So why do you refuse to consider the possibility that instead of your God being a messy and inefficient designer, he is - for instance - a highly efficient experimental scientist, trying new things, eager to make new discoveries, or to give himself new ideas?

Theodicy

dhw: If God exists, I am all in favour of us gratefully accepting his good works, and I have no trouble accepting that the bad is the price which has to be paid. Just like you, I love life (goody, goody) but accept the fact that one day I must die (baddy, baddy). But this does not offer even one syllable to explain how your God can create evil either deliberately, yet be all-good, or reluctantly, yet be all-powerful.

DAVID: Goff's limits on all-powerful is a reasonable view.

dhw: I agree. But I don’t agree with your belief that all-powerful can be defined as power with limits.

DAVID: Well Goff can, so I can.

His preference for a God with limited powers does not mean that he defines all-powerful as meaning with limited powers!

DAVID (under "microbiomes in vaginas”): You see the bugs are good. The reality we live in includes bad bugs.

dhw: I’ve never denied that there are good and bad things. Theodicy asks how the bad can mean that your first-cause Creator of everything that exists can be all-good.

DAVID: It is an answer in its proportionality.
And:
The theodicy answers point out proportionality.

dhw: Theodicy does not ask what is the percentage of good versus bad. It asks how the bad…. etc. as above.

DAVID: Bechly has produced a huge technical piece in which he is considering deciding common descent is not correct. […] I feel you can't have natural processes and God working together, in which God is not also in charge of the natural side. Natural might not give Him the results He wants.

That depends on what results he wants. Since the history of life is one of an ever changing variety of life forms, may I suggest that he wanted an ever-changing variety of life forms. If he wanted to create a being in his own image, may I suggest that the large variety of life forms leading to the wide variety of hominins and homos, which in turn led to us and our food, might be the work of a God experimenting in order to find the best formula. Or maybe he wanted a free-for-all (best achieved by giving autonomy to his invention of the intelligent cell) but allowed himself to dabble – humans figuring as an idea that occurred to him late on in the process.

As for Bechly, after an almost interminable study of such items as the the tail filament of certain spiders (I felt like shouting “Get a life!”) he comes to the following conclusions:
https://evolutionnews.org/2023/12/fossil-friday-the-mess-of-arachnid-phylogeny-and-why-...

“We were not there to watch what happened and simply don’t know, so that every reconstruction of past events is a hypothetical inference to the best explanation based on circumstantial evidence and a lot of theoretical guesswork based on shaky assumptions.”

Agreed.

“This does not necessarily mean that “God diddit,” but it also means that nothing has been refuted and we should not a priori exclude alternative explanations like intelligent agency. […] For this reason, I currently and provisionally still think that the total evidence of all lines of data favors common descent as the most parsimonious and most elegant explanation. However, I definitely remain open (and now more sympathetic) to alternatives like progressive creation combined with other explanations for the pattern of biological similarities...

All agreed. It's a good "agnostic" approach. But I’m surprised that he doesn’t mention Shapiro’s alternative “intelligent agency”, namely the intelligent cell, which allows for both Nature diddit and God diddit.