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

by dhw, Saturday, April 27, 2024, 08:54 (208 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy and boredom

dhw: Please tell us if you regard the Holocaust and the 50 million flu victims as secondary and morally justified by the fact that such evil relieves us from being bored.

DAVID: Yes, as a morally sufficient reason to give us free will.

dhw: Thank you for this straight answer. In order to relieve his (and our) boredom, he allowed millions of murders and designed bugs which he knew would kill millions of victims. And yet you insist that he is selfless and has no self-interest.

DAVID: Same answer. Proportionality is absent in your complaint. Life entails these problems.

dhw: It is no defence of evil to say that there is more good than evil. We know life entails evil, and the question is why an all-good God would allow human evil and deliberately create the natural evils for which you blame him.

DAVID: The moral sufficiency is in free will for us, a good, with the unfortunate result in humans creating evil. Not God's fault as you distort it.

According to your boredom theory, your omniscient God allowed us to commit evil and knew what we would do, and is to be blamed for designing bugs that would kill us, but was morally justified in doing so because it alleviated boredom. “Unfortunate”? Who for? You tell us that it is good and morally justified, because it alleviates his and our boredom.

dhw: […]And this is the God you tell us is selfless and without self-interest.

DAVID: God has no self-interest and does not have a personality trait of boredom. Stop humanizing Him. When will you ever learn how to really think out Him?

When will you ever learn to stop contradicting yourself.. Earlier you wrote:”There are no established standards for who God is.” How then can you possibly announce that he has no self-interest or boredom, when you’ve just proposed, championed and claimed moral justification for the theory that your God allowed/created evil to alleviate boredom.You have consistently ridiculed the concept of Eden as being boring for us (although you agree that we can lead interesting lives without evil), and as far as your God and human free will are concerned:
dhw: I’m sure you’ll agree that your God , who you believe is interested in his creations, would find puppets boring.

DAVID: Exactly.

And so according to you, he allowed/created evil in order to relieve boredom. For himself and for us.

Under "Giant viruses"

DAVID: It is your cockamamy view of evolution that is at fault. All species produced were relevant in their time.

dhw: Relevant to what? Certainly not to what you believe to have been your God’s one and only purpose (us and our food), since only 0.1% of them led to us and our food.

DAVID: Relevant to current ecosystems of the time in evolution.

dhw: [..] Thank you for confirming their irrelevance to the present, which is the reason why your theory of evolution is so illogical.

DAVID: One gets to the present through past stages of evolution! Amazing isn't it.

dhw: You have explicitly agreed that the present is “descended” from 0.1% of past stages of evolution, which means that 99.9% of them were irrelevant to what you claim was your God’s sole purpose. Stop dodging.

DAVID: This is where your maths about evolution are so confused: The 0.1% surviving COULD NOT be here without the preceding 99.9% having lived!!! Stop the irrationality of your dodge.
And:
DAVID: All extinction led to current new living forms.

But the 0.1% is the lines of organisms that led to us and our food. Read what you wrote:

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

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

If we plus food are not descended from the 99.9%, how can they have led to us plus food? We used the dinosaurs as our obvious example: only birds descended from them. The rest were dead ends.

Transferred from “More Miscellany”

dhw: You have just agreed that your faith in your choices (apart from the design theory) is irrational (i.e. not logical).

DAVID: The thoughts are logical. The final leap is not.

dhw: That depends on which of your choices we’re talking about. […]

DAVID: Your weird distortion of my theology is not worth discussing, as totally preposterous.

dhw: Please tell us which part of the [..] theory is a distortion. To be precise: do you now reject your beliefs that (1) we and our food were your God’s sole purpose, 2) that he chose to design and cull 99.9% of past species, 3) that we and our food are descended from only 0.1% of past species, which means the remaining 99.9% were irrelevant to his purpose?

DAVID: Your invented discussion of the statistics of survival in evolution is wildly illogical.

It is precisely what you agreed to. 99.9% did not lead to us or our food. (See above.) There are no distortions, and your denial of your own theories is “totally preposterous”.