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

by dhw, Saturday, December 16, 2023, 08:49 (133 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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: Back to your favorite form of a humanized God. God ended up with 0.1% designed and here now, not 99.9%!

That is the whole point! Only 0.1% of past life forms evolved into the life forms that are here now. 99.9%, according to you, were designed by your God and had to be culled by your God because they had no connection with his one and only purpose! And you don’t know why he would have designed them in the first place, as that would have been a messy, cumbersome, inefficient way of fulfilling the goal you impose on him.

DAVID: Your concept of our current food supply is 0.1% of what is on Earth. […] You can't deny we use the whole Earth for our food supply.

What on Earth are you talking about? This is your most outrageous distortion of my "concepts"! The current food supply is descended from 0.1% of past life forms. Of course we use the whole Earth for our food supply. Stop manufacturing straw men!

DAVID: And the stability of our food supply, especially if wild, depends upon stable ecosystems.

Of course it does.

DAVID: Assuming God exists and evolved us, you are denying the actual history of what occurred as God created it. Totally illogical. You approach is you don't like the way God did it.

There is no denial of what occurred: the history generally agreed is that 99.9% of past life forms became extinct, and current life forms evolved from the 0.1% of life forms that survived. It is NOT history that your God designed every species, or that your God’s one and only purpose was to design us and our food. Both of these are your theories, which you yourself ridicule as messy and inefficient when combined. No, I don’t like the way you say God did it. The history could have been created in different ways and for different reasons, but you are locked into a theory that makes no sense even to you.

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

dhw: 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?

DAVID: The difference is I see a powerful God who knows exactly what He wishes and creates it.

Strangely enough, I see the same. And my vision is no more human than yours.

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. […]

dhw: 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.

DAVID: The pre-Cambrian set up a biochemical form of life which was used in the Cambrian forms. Full connection biochemically.

Biochemistry is common to all forms of life, but according to you, the forms of life that existed pre-Cambrian were not the forms from which we are descended. Stop dodging.

Theodicy

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I agree.

Then I shall only bring it up again if you start pontificating about how good God is, and the diseases and evils he is responsible for are only secondary.