Return to David's theory of evolution, purpose & theodicy (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, March 18, 2024, 09:09 (40 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your criticism of His evolutionary method is boldy obvious. Stop denying it.
And under “importance of microbiomes”:
DAVID: You can't help but continuously revert to complaining about the way God evolved us.

dhw: This is the worst of your dodges. I DO NOT DEMAND THAT GOD – if he exists – SHOULD NOT HAVE EVOLVED US. I demand a reason why your God would deliberately and inefficiently design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with the purpose you impose on him.
In other words, I am critical of the messy, cumbersome and inefficient method of achieving the purpose you impose on your God in your derogatory and illogical theory of evolution. Stop denying it!

DAVID: Fascinating! You continue to defend my God from my criticisms of Him. I have to continuously remind you it was your early objection to the round-about-way evolution works compared to direct creation that I agreed with, causing the current disagreement. Evolution is not a straight-forward method!

More silly twisting of the argument. Assuming your God exists, if he had only wanted to design us plus food, then of course direct creation would have been the obvious way for an all-powerful, all-knowing God to do it! But he did not create us directly, which can only mean one or more of these theistic alternatives: 1) he is not all-powerful; 2) he is not all-knowing; 3) his purpose was not confined to designing us and our food; 4) he did not design every individual species (but instead designed Shapiro’s autonomous cellular intelligence, or left speciation to Darwin’s random mutations and natural selection); 5) he is the messy, cumbersome, inefficient, illogical designer you say he is.

Experimentation

dhw: And still you dodge the question of what alterations your “autonomous experimentation” can produce, and why an autonomous mechanism (possibly designed by your God) would be incapable of producing the innovations that lead to speciation.

DAVID: You struggle back to secondhand design, a very complicated way to design anything.

dhw: Not complicated if your God’s purpose was to enjoy and learn from the invention of something he endowed with the freedom to do its own designing (humans included). Perfectly logical by comparison with the messy, inefficient combination of purpose and method you impose on him. See the Plantinga article for more nonsensical contradictions.

DAVID: Back to your wish for an overly human God.

dhw: This is no more “overly human” than Plantinga’s view – which you say you support - of a self-centred God who wants us humans to love him of our own free will, even if this means untold suffering through the evil that free will allows (not to mention the nasty bugs and the natural disasters that he either creates or allows in his love for us).

DAVID: Same old theodicy problems that trouble you with no reason to answer them again.
And:
DAVID: You will never understand how theists think and are comfortable with their feelings. It is proportionality, as expressed before. All you see is evil, which to me is a very small part of our reality

Acknowledging all the good does not make all the evil disappear, and if you think it is a very small part of our reality, you are living in cloud-cuckoo land. But you are right, I will never understand how any theist can believe that their God wants to be recognized, worshipped and loved but has no self-interest; and I will never understand how any theist can be comfortable with the belief that their God doesn’t care what suffering he has caused through his knowingly “allowing” evil (e.g. war, genocide, tyranny, famine, flood, disease etc.) so long as some people freely choose to love him.