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

by dhw, Sunday, March 24, 2024, 09:36 (242 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The theory you have chosen is one for which you can find no logical justification – hence your criticism of it.

DAVID: The justification is our appearance! We are the only organism on Earth that knows how we got here, and incidentally might create a relationship with our designer.***

dhw: We don’t know how we got here. But even if we are the only organism that wonders how we did and who might form a relationship with God (if he exists), he did not have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, or one-track-minded, or messy or inefficient, in order to produce us. I have offered you alternative explanations, with one example repeated below:

(*** You agreed with Plantinga that God's purpose for creating us was that we should love him of our own free will. It was not "incidental".)

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.

DAVID: God, as I see Him, always know exactly what He wishes to create and does it by a method of His choice.

dhw: Agreed. And that does not have to be the incomprehensible, inefficient combination of purpose and method that you impose upon him.

DAVID: Evolution occurred and God did it. Nothing incomprehensible about that fact. I view it as a cumbersome method, but as God did it for His own reasons, I'm happy with the result we are alive.

If God exists, I have no objection whatsoever to the theory that evolution occurred and God did it. (God’s existence is not a fact.) This discussion is solely about your God’s possible purpose and method: it is NOT a fact that his only purpose was to design us, or that he specially designed every single species, let alone that he knowingly and deliberately designed and culled 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with that single purpose. That is your theory, which you agree is incomprehensible (you don’t know why he would have done that), messy, cumbersome and inefficient. The fact that you are happy to be alive does not depend on the illogical theory of evolution you cling to.

DAVID: Your logic does not equal God's. The God you create is an imaginary form of a human acting as if He were God.

dhw: The God you create is an imaginary form of a god whose messy, inefficient combination of purpose and method makes no sense even to you, and whose desire to be loved, regardless of the suffering his desire may cause, makes him just about as self-centred as any human could possibly be.

DAVID: Back to you concocted view of God which I've criticized in another thread.

I have not “concocted” a view of God on the Plantinga thread. I have merely pointed out that Plantinga’s view (with which you agree) presents us with a self-centred God whose desire to be freely loved has led to appalling consequences, to which he appears to be indifferent, since he chose to allow such evils as the Holocaust. You have avoided replying to this argument, just as you avoid acknowledging the illogicality of your theory of evolution, with its explicit criticism of your God’s messy inefficiency.