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

by dhw, Thursday, December 14, 2023, 13:05 (343 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The problem is your all-powerful God having only one purpose (us and our food) and therefore deliberately designing 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his one and only purpose. […] You agree that it makes no sense, because I should ask God why he did it that way, but your position is what you call “locked”.

DAVID: The method God chose, evolving us results in exactly what you decry! We feed on the entire bush of life.

We feed on the CURRENT bush of life. We do not feed on the 99.9 species you say your God designed and had to cull because they had no connection with us or our food. Please stop playing silly word games.

DAVID: I do not feel it makes no sense. God produces exactly what He chooses to produce, and I accept His works as entirely necessary. […] I cannot know His reasons. […]

It makes sense to you though you can’t think of any reasons for such inefficiency. I agree that your God, if he exists, would produce exactly what he chooses to produce for whatever his purpose might be. This is your dodging technique of using vague generalisations in order to hide the absurdity of a theory which makes no sense even to you.

DAVID: God's purpose is to produce humans and their dominion over the Earth to provide our food, today's actual situation.

I’m aware of today’s situation, but like you, I can make no sense of the bolded theory above that he designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species in order to reach it. And so since “he produces exactly what he chooses to produce”, he may have had a different purpose for designing the 99.9 species, or he didn’t design them at all, but enabled them to design themselves (e.g. see the article on extremophiles in “More Miscellany, Part Two).

dhw: 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? […] 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?

DAVID: My position is God produced evolution and the speciation required. As for a dino related example, don't we eat birds? And our math discussion is all post Cambrian.

dhw: Our math discussion is from the very beginning, not from the Cambrian, and birds represent the 0.1% that survived from the dino era. (But crocodiles may also be descendants. Maybe 0.2% survived.)

DAVID: Mathematically, 0.1% is every living form on Earth now. Death of 99.9% of all predecessors produced the 0.1% living today.

How can dead ends produce anything? The 0.1% (if the figures are correct) of today are the descendants from the lines of the 0.1% that survived extinction. And you in particular have vehemently opposed the very idea that we and our food are descended from the 99.9% through your insistence that the life forms from which we and our food are descended were all created “de novo”, i.e. without precursors, during the Cambrian.

DAVID: That is how Raup analyzed the math of evolution. In any evolution there is loss leading to the present. You are still complaining about God's method.

Your Raup quote made no mention of the 99.9% being direct ancestors of us and our food. We only know of one evolution of life, so I don’t know what other evolutions you’re talking about. But I’m not denying loss, and I’m not complaining about your God’s method. If your God exists, I’ve offered three logical explanations for the loss, and my complaint is entirely about your illogical theory concerning your God’s messy, cumbersome and inefficient method (your description of it).

Theodicy
dhw: Evil exists, and the question is how your first cause God could have invented evil and yet be all-good. It is not answered by saying there’s only 10% (or whatever) evil compared to 90% (or whatever) good!

DAVID: Proportionality is 99.9% good, 0.1% evil.

I have no idea where you got such figures from, but they are irrelevant anyway. Whatever the proportion, evil exists, and percentages do not answer the question posed above.

DAVID: I take the approach God knows the correct things to create.

dhw: “Correct”? Your all-powerful God would create whatever he wanted to create!

DAVID: Agreed.

And so we are left with the question how your all-powerful, all-knowing God, no matter whether he WANTED to create these causes of evil or was powerless to prevent the molecular ones, can be all good.

DAVID: Back to faith you refuse to consider. We like God as He is. Not the answer you want. We fully recognize the points you make and are satisfied with our responses. It is a Dayenu position.

The question is not about whether you like him or not, but about his nature. Your solution to the theodicy problem is to say you know there’s a problem but it doesn’t matter (a) because there’s more good than evil, or (b) because in spite of the problem you still believe he’s all-good, or (c) even if he’s part evil, you like him as he is.