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

by dhw, Sunday, April 21, 2024, 08:49 (12 days ago) @ David Turell

Welcome back. I hope you’ve fully recovered now!

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?

DAVID: 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 (April 16): All Raup said was 0.1% are the living result.

The fact that the current 0.1% are amazing has nothing whatsoever to do with your wacky theory, and you have agreed explicitly that they are not descended from the 99.9% of extinct species, as follows:

dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from the 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived.?

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

If we and our food are NOT descended from the 99.9%, then the 99.9% were irrelevant to your God’s one and only purpose, which was to produce us and our food. Please stop contradicting yourself, and please stop moaning that I am distorting Raup, who you have agreed provides absolutely no support for your wacky theory.

I pointed out that carnivorousness was a forerunner of killing for personal gain.

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.

DAVID: OK, so they destroy plants.

Do you regard growing and eating potatoes and beans as being on a par with killing and eating a fellow animal? NB I’m not campaigning for vegetarianism. I’m merely pointing out that carnivorousness is a pre-human process which in principle anticipates many human evils, as these generally arise from the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others.

Theodicy and relief from boredom

dhw: 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.

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

You have agreed that humans do many things that entertain but are not boring. It is therefore perfectly possible to lead an interesting life without the rapes, murders, holocausts, bugs and natural disasters which your God apparently allowed/created in order to alleviate his and our boredom.

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.

DAVID: So, a humanized God is OK with you?

It is you who proposed that God would have found an Eden full of puppets boring. That is no less “humanized” than my proposing that God might have created life because he wanted to create something he would find interesting.

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.

DAVID: 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.

No it isn’t, and no it doesn’t. The above example (non-mainstream is bad, except if it’s YOUR non-mainstream) is YOUR self-serving use of double standards. I can’t believe that you haven’t understood the explanation.