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

by dhw, Saturday, May 18, 2024, 08:34 (187 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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.

I refuse to accept that an omniscient and omnipotent God would deliberately design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to his purpose, that a God who might want us to worship him can’t want us to worship him because he is selfless, that he certainly enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, but he can’t possibly want to enjoy and be interested in anything because although he probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours, he can’t possibly have thought patterns and emotions like ours. I do not impose any “strict” attributes on him. I don’t even know if he exists, and so I only offer alternative possibilities.

Evolution and Raup

dhw: 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: […] 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 does an all-powerful God, who you tell us is perfectly capable of designing species “de novo”, choose to design and cull 99.9% if his one and only purpose is to produce the 0.1%?

DAVID: How can I answer? I have imposed God upon the history of evolution as its creator. As result He inherits the unwieldy process.

Your God is first cause. How can he inherit anything? As first cause he would have INVENTED the process!

DAVID: 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?

It is you who insist on this combination of purpose and method, as if you had talked to God! I question the rationality of your THEORY. Nobody knows the truth!

Dhw: […] 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.

So why do you ask? How do you know that your God, who according to you probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours, could not possibly have what you call “humanized thought”, i.e. thought patterns and emotions like ours?

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?

DAVID: 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.

I asked about God wanting us to worship him, and you switch to us wanting God to care about us! In any case, if Adler offers 50/50 for all the theories, stop pretending that he supports your 100% omnipotent, omniscient, all-good, selfless version of God. And please tell us if all theologians agree with you that God does not want us to recognize and worship him because he is selfless. And do you agree with yourself?