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

by David Turell , Saturday, April 20, 2024, 17:45 (13 days ago) @ dhw

Plantinga

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

dhw: The irrelevant species are the 99.9% which are no longer here and which were not even our ancestors (who you agree amounted to only 0.1% of organisms that ever lived). How could humans eat organisms which are no longer here?

Your distortion of Raup's review of extinctions in evolution is a sick joke. Of course, evolution produced extinctions. BUT the 0.1% surviving are an amazing bush of life for human use! The survivors came from the 99.9% now extinct. If one views evolution as developed by a purposeful God, the results is perfectly understandable.

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

dhw: And history shows us that approx. 99.9% of organisms that lived before us had no connection with us, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that your God had a reason for wanting them. You, on the other hand, would prefer to forget them, since they contradict your wacky theory of evolution.

Not forgotten. They are the ancestors of current life.

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

dhw: Herbivores do not eat kill and eat their fellow animals.

OK, so they destroy plants.

Theodicy and relief from boredom

dhw: 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".)

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.

Our necessary free will means we cannot avoid evil happening. A human cause of evil, not God's fault.

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

dhw: Irrelevant to your new theory, which is that your God wanted evil because without it, life would have been boring. This contradicts your belief that God is selfless, and it supports one of my proposals: that his purpose for creating life might have been to enjoy creating things that would be interesting. But you dismissed that possibility because it “humanized” God in a way you disapproved of.

So, a humanized God is OK with you?

Double standards

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

dhw: You are determined to ignore the meaning of the term “double standards”. The attack is not on your choices or rejections, but on your application of a particular standard (you reject deism because it is not mainstream), while you defend your panentheism although it is not mainstream either. Non-mainstream is bad if it’s someone else’s opinion, but it’s OK if it’s your opinion.

Your self-serving use of double standards is simply telling me not to make valid choices between two positions. It protects your 'no-choice' agnosticism as mental neutralism.