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

by dhw, Monday, December 11, 2023, 12:06 (138 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your crazy response is that God should not have evolved us.

dhw: Where on earth have you dredged that idea from? If your God exists, I have no objection whatsoever to his using the process of evolution for whatever his purpose may have been, and I have no objection whatsoever to the fact that this process produced us. I object only to the sheer illogicality of your combined theories, as bolded above, and I’m surprised that you should insist on a theory that makes your God into a messy, inefficient designer.

As usual, you skip this whole section. No, I don’t say God should not have evolved us. My only objection is to your “crazy” theory which makes your God into a messy, inefficient designer.

DAVID: […] 0.1% is the present created by a necessary 99.9% eliminated in the evolution process in which better organisms are created by design.

dhw: The 0.1% were not created by the 99.9%!

DAVID: Of course, they were. They are the current survivors.

dhw: They are the current survivors of the 0.1% of species that did not come to a dead end during the history of evolution.

DAVID: Correct!!! 99.9% are simply ancestors of the currently living.

Wrong. 99.9% were dead ends. Only 0.1% were ancestors of the currently living. For instance, are you telling us that 99.9% of dinosaurs evolved into us and our food? You have accepted the image of evolution as a bush of life forms. Bushes branch out from their roots, and the branches do not meet. It's called diversification. 99.9% became dead ends.To make matters worse, according to you, all the species from which we and our food have descended were created "de novo" during the Cambrian, so according to you, how can we be descended from 99.9% of all the species that preceded the Cambrian?

dhw: [..] you have accidentally hit upon ONE of my theories, by having him “creating better organisms by design”. If he consciously designed and got rid of inferior organisms in his quest to create a being like himself (humans), he was clearly experimenting. But you won’t even consider that idea, although you’ve just suggested it yourself.

DAVID: Concepts of God do not need experimentation.

dhw: Who decides on what is "needed"? […] Why are you now disowning your own suggestion that he got rid of earlier, inferior designs and “created better organisms by design”, which clearly amounts to experimentation.

DAVID: Not experimentation if purposely designed in a series.

So now you have an all-powerful, all-knowing God who knowingly designs and then gets rid of a series of inferior organisms in order to design better organisms. Just as messy and inefficient as your first version.

dhw: […] A free-for-all would have a different purpose – the enjoyment of discovery, seeing how his invention produces new delights (or horrors!) and possibly giving him new ideas of his own (he can always dabble, and humans might well have been such a product, since they came so late on the scene). But your mind is closed to any such alternatives.

DAVID: Again we are presented with a God who experiments for unexpected results, suddenly is guided to new ideas, has no specific goal and stumbles upon the thought of humans. Not A form of God I recognize.

The goal I have described entails enjoyment, discovery, learning new things, getting new ideas. The God you have described knows exactly what he wants from the start, and deliberately designs 100 life forms of which 99.9 have no connection with what he wants and have to be culled. I doubt if many of your fellow believers would recognize such a bumbling, inefficient designer.

Theodicy

DAVID: God knows exactly how to proceed within rigid limits.

dhw: At least you’ve now realized that proportionality does not answer the theodicy question. God having limited powers provides a feasible answer to that question. What is not feasible is a definition of “all-powerful” as “having limited powers.” Likewise, God wanting to create the mixture of good and bad because the latter brings out the full value of the former would also be a feasible explanation for evil, but that doesn’t solve the problem of how he can be called all-good.

DAVID: Using evil as a measuring aspect of the good is a reasonable approach. That is the proportionality argument.

dhw: There is no measuring involved in the second theory. Stop twisting.

Ignored.

DAVID: I think all-powerful with limits is a feasible concept.

dhw: If your powers are limited, you cannot be ALL-powerful.

DAVID: Yes, can be. All-powerful in every aspect but one. Inventing biochemical reactions that require freely acting molecules in which tightly restrictive controls won't work.

All-powerful , then, except when he's not all-powerful. You also harp on about his attempts to provide counter-measures, but still the mistakes continue to have their devastating effects, as you know from your experiences as a physician. We won’t bother to go into the source of other forms of non-human evil, such as the different types of natural disaster which he may or may not control.