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

by dhw, Friday, May 17, 2024, 13:41 (188 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Round and round we go. 1) Why the messy, inefficient design and culling of the 99.9 irrelevant species? 2) What would your purposeful God’s purpose be for producing humans?

DAVID: 1)has no answer if God is in charge, that it what He chose to do for His own reasons.

Which you denigrate as resulting in a messy, cumbersome and inefficient way of achieving the one and only purpose YOU guess he has.

DAVID: 2)we only guess. Perhaps a desire to produce sentient creatures? Should we guess further?

If you are reluctant to guess why he might have wanted to create us, why are you so dead set on guessing why he wanted to produce the whole of life? Why don’t you just say you believe God created life, and leave it at that?

DAVID: I withdraw no guesses. You force that appearance because you illegitimately interpret guesses as declarations of fact.

dhw: You have pinpointed the mixture through which you contradict yourself. Example: I ask why your God wanted to produce humans. Your guess: maybe he wants us to recognize and worship him. I point out that this denotes self-interest. Your answer: “My God is selfless, nothing is produced by Him to satisfy self needs.” The latter contradicts the former, and is expressed as if it were a fact....Is that “how to think about God”?

DAVID: Assign to God no human attributes, no human desires. God is selfness without self-desires that need to be satisfied. Accept my guesses with this background of thought. You do not understand it.

Why on earth should I accept this guess, which contradicts so many of your other guesses? No, I don’t understand a “background of thought” which orders me to ignore all the contradictions with which you lumber yourself.

Evolution and Raup

dhw: I do not believe that the God you have inserted into Raup’s statement would have said to himself: “In order to produce humans, I have to create lots of different conditions and lots of new species and cull 99.9% of them then start with more new conditions, species and cullings etc. until I get to the Cambrian and directly design “de novo” all the species which I shall later turn into sapiens and his food.”... and yet you tell me I’m denigrating your God!!! Raup says it’s all a matter of luck. You say it’s God in control. Which of us is distorting Raup?

DAVID: you are. Raup says 99.9% of extinctions produced the present 0.1%. You are criticizing the method if GOD did it. If natural the 99.9% is suddenly, OK? Total absurdity.

All of a sudden the whole discussion is revolving around what Raup says or doesn’t say. This is what you have told us: "His study was to explain why extinctions happened as a necessary part of evolution. He concluded 'bad luck'. Well-adapted species suddenly were unprepared for new circumstances. The loses cumulatively were 99.9% with 0.1% as survivors.[…]

He doesn’t say extinctions “produce” anything, and if he did, it would be sheer nonsense. Extinctions mark an end. Only the survivors can produce something. But extinctions are necessary because new circumstances are necessary for new species, and new circumstances will inevitably lead to extinctions. It is, according to Raup, a matter of luck which species perish and which survive and are able to produce the new species that will cope with the new circumstances until circumstances change again. An all-powerful God with one purpose would not have been compelled by some law of his own making to stage extinction after extinction, designing and culling the 99.9%! And so he must have chosen the process deliberately, which confronts you with the question you can’t answer: why did he choose to design and cull 99.9% if his one and only purpose was to produce the 0.1%? It makes no sense, which is why you ridicule it as inefficient. I am not disputing the history presented by Raup, and I am not disputing the idea that your God (if he exists) chose to use this process of evolution for his own purposes. I am disputing the absurd notion that he deliberately and inefficiently designed every species, knowing that 99.9% were irrelevant to the purpose you impose on him. Either he didn’t design them all, or he had a different purpose.

Humanization

DAVID: Your constant distortions of God, because you do not know how to think about Him following theological rules, leads to my rebuttals.

dhw: What rebuttals? You keep “rebutting” your own thoughts about God, but you have agreed that my logic is “impeccable”, and I’m still waiting to hear what “theological rules” force you to start with what you wish to believe and to contradict yourself over and over again. […] And my alternatives are no more humanized than your God, who certainly enjoys creating, wants to be worshipped, is to blame for the bad bugs, messes up evolution with his inefficient design, and probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours.

DAVID: God creates but not with any self-motive, a strict guideline of theological thought.

Stop hiding behind vague generalizations. One example: does theological thought reject the theory that God wants to be recognized and worshipped?