Return to David's theory of theodicy;Plantinga & Held (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, April 15, 2024, 21:14 (14 days ago) @ dhw

Plantinga

DAVID: Are you suggesting God should have kept us as puppets?

dhw: No. If God exists, I have even suggested that one explanation for the 99.9% of “irrelevant” species was that he created life as one vast free-for-all, right through from speciation to human machinations. This would also give you a logical explanation for human evil, which would have its roots in the egocentric battle for survival.

Your alternative of irrelevant species is crazy. What would humans eat, how would they live without the organisms you consider irrelevant.

DAVID: Survival can occur without evil.

dhw: Of course it can. Just as enjoyment of life can occur without evil (see below). But in the free-for-all, it doesn’t. You missed out my reference to carnivorousness as a forerunner: killing for personal gain.

It has to be dog-eat-dog. Life requires a constant input of energy.

DAVID: Human choices cause evil. Evil is our fault, God not involved.

dhw: You have said that your God wanted to relieve the boredom of a Garden of Eden, and that morally justifies his knowingly allowing murder, rape, the holocaust etc., and for good measure he is also to be blamed for creating bugs that kill millions of us.

We cause evils, not God!!!

DAVID: [..] I can't know God's reason for His creative results, but producing us is His obvious intention with all the manifestations.

dhw: Producing the vast variety of species unconnected with us would also have been his obvious intention with all the different manifestations. Why do you keep forgetting the 3.X billion years of history which you have dismissed as your God’s messy, cumbersome and inefficient way of designing us plus food?

DAVID: God can take whatever amount of time He needed. We know His system was not direct.

dhw: Assuming he exists, we do not know that we plus food were his one and only goal, or that he deliberately designed every individual species. The fact that we only appeared after 3.X billion years’ worth of species that had no connection with us would seem to suggest that being all-powerful and all-knowing (according to you), he must have had a different purpose for designing the 99.9 irrelevant species, or that he did not design them. How about relief from boredom as a motive for the ever-changing variety?

WE must use history to tell us what God did. We are here in charge of the Earth. That is what God wanted.

dhw: Either way, being omniscient, he knew that murder, rape and the holocaust would be the result, but he allowed it in order to prevent boredom, […] why do you think boredom can only be avoided if millions of people suffer the effects of the evil that your God has created or allowed? (See also under "Giant viruses" on "More Miscellany".)

Pure Eden is boring. Obvously.

DAVID: Your usual tortured reasoning. Humans do many things that entertain, yet not be evil!!!

dhw: That is what I have just pointed out!!! You can avoid boredom without millions of people suffering from evil. You have now informed us that your God allowed murder, rape and the holocaust because he and we would have been bored without them. (He would have found puppets boring.) Your new version of God is just as egocentric as Plantinga’s, and you have once more contradicted yourself, because here you agree that we do not need evil in order to relieve possible boredom.

Same confused view. We need bad bugs in good places (gut biome). There are necessary tradeoffs.

Double standards

DAVID: 1) Choice is not an issue of double standards. 2) Being proud of seeing both sides as equals simply is not being willing to make choices. 3) Almost nothing presented is truly 50/50.

dhw: I’ve omitted the rest of the post, since you haven’t taken any notice of it, and I’ve numbered your comments. Once more: 1) is correct. 2) Nothing to do with pride, and not willing to make a choice has nothing to do with double standards. 3) Nobody knows the “truth”. Of course a fixed belief in one option is not a 50/50. None of this has anything to do with double standards, a term which denotes the use of one standard to reject an opinion, and the defence of an opinion although it also violates the same standard. For example, you rejected deism because it was not mainstream theology, but you embrace panentheism although it is not mainstream theology.

Once again you illogically attack my choices. Of course, choice involves rejections. You simply want to float neutrally above all.