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

by dhw, Friday, December 15, 2023, 13:01 (342 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We feed on the entire bush of life.

dhw: 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: Your view of evolution is totally backwards and baseless. Whether you realize it or not, your view is God should not have used evolution to create us.

This is one of your favourite dodges. If God exists, I have no objection whatsoever to his use of evolution to create us and everything else that ever lived. BUT...We do not feed on the 99.9% of species that had no connection with us or our food. If God exists and designed the 99.9%, then his motive for doing so could not have been exclusively to design us and our food. Therefore either we were not his one and only goal, or he had to experiment to get what he wanted, or he did not design the 99.9%.

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

dhw: I’m aware of today’s situation, but like you, I can make no sense of the bolded theory above.

DAVID: […]. Don't invent a present which does not exist. The facts reasonably reach the conclusion God wanted us to appear and rule the Earth.

I accept that we exist and are the dominant species. And if he exists, your God may have wanted us to appear and rule the Earth. I do not accept that in order to create us, he had to design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us. I have offered you alternative explanations for the 99.9%, but you prefer to stick with a theory that makes no sense to you and which ridicules your God’s method as messy, cumbersome and inefficient.

DAVID: Your three explanations create a humanized God. Evolution is a cumbersome method compared to direct creation like the Cambrian.

See below for the implications of the Cambrian. Your “humanization” argument is plain silly, since you agree that your God probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours, and why wouldn’t the designs reflect aspects of the designer? Your own versions of an inefficient God who wants us to admire his work, hates evil, would like to have a relationship with us, is powerless to prevent some of the evil for which he’s responsible etc. etc. is no less “human” than my alternatives.

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

dhw: How can dead ends produce anything? […]

DAVID: The 'dead ends' are culled branches from the direct lines that led to all on Earth now. If it were all 'dead ends', nothing would be alive today. You are upside down and backwards in your crazy analysis.

More obfuscation. The branches were not ALL dead ends. 0.1% of them led to us and our food. It’s only you who make nonsense of the figures by insisting that we and our food (or perhaps just most of our food) are directly descended from Cambrian life forms that were designed “de novo”, i.e. had no precursors. In which case, it was 100% of pre-Cambrian life that had no connection with us plus our food. Plus all the post-Cambrians, such as non-avian dinosaurs.

Theodicy

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Good analysis of the theodicy position of believers, but you left out: Evil exists secondary to God's good works.

Meaningless. Diseases, natural disasters, war, murder, rape are all the direct result of your first-cause, all-powerful, all-knowing God’s designs. You agree that none of your three responses solves the problem, and “secondary” waffle doesn’t solve it either. Other theories remove the attributes of omnipotence of omniscience, so that’s probably as far as we can go in this discussion.