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

by David Turell , Friday, May 17, 2024, 19:18 (188 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

Your invented contradictions exist because you refuse to accept God's attributes as I describe them. Tell your strict attributes or do they wander all over the place.

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.

dhw: 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%?

How can I answer? I have imposed God upon the history of evolution as its creator. As result He inherits the unwieldy process. I can't invent a reason God might have had to choose this method. Why do you insist upon asking unanswerable questions as if I am directly speaking with God?

dhw; 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.

Tell us your invented God's possible purposes. I know we will read experimentation and free-for-all, all humanized thought.

Humanization

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

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

Answer: Adler says God's concern about us is a 50/50 proposition. Which means human desires for God's attention are human desires applied to God. Back to 50/50!! I am quoting a world-famous philosopher of religion steeped in all the theological thought you want to hear from.