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

by dhw, Thursday, May 23, 2024, 13:53 (148 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I am following all of every instruction I was taught. [...] You are simply listening to your own imagination, guideless in theology.

I keep asking you to tell us what instructions have led you to all your contradictions. Why won’t you tell us?

How God works

Your comments on this article encapsulate virtually every contradiction in your thinking, so I’ll go through them and incorporate other quotes by you.

DAVID: this is in distinct contrast to how I believe. Adler says God's attention to us is 50/50. There is a vast spread of beliefs about God as this comparison shows, because everyone choses the God He wishes to believe in.
DAVID: “You do not know how to think about Him following theological rules.”
“There are as many forms of God as people invent Him.”
(Re other theologians such as bishops, rabbis and imams): “Their God is not my
God as I describe Him.

So would you please stop telling us that you follow guidelines and attributes laid down by theologians when it is perfectly clear from this article and your own comments that you go your own way, and lots of other theologians go lots of different ways. Please focus on the arguments instead of pretending that your illogicalities and contradictions are covered by your knowledge of how theologians think.

DAVID: dhw rales at me for doing exactly that. When you arrive at belief, as I did, after much reading, you must pick the sort of God you wish to believe in. I chose the prevailing Western mono-theistic all-everything version. But I never could adopt the God is dhw's vivid imagination.

There are two distinct areas of discussion here. 1) I rail against all the blatant illogicalities and contradictions that riddle your version of God’s purpose, actions and nature, and 2) you attempt to attack my alternatives. Your “prevailing all-everything” version makes him the first cause who is forced by some inherited law to design 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to the purpose you impose on him (hence your ridiculing him as an inefficient designer), has him possibly wanting to be worshipped and enjoying creation but without self-interest, all-powerful but powerless to prevent his murderous bugs from murdering us (for which you blame him), not wanting to be bored by puppets but incapable of boredom, and probably having human thought patterns and emotions like ours but certainly not human in any sense. And you pretend that all these contradictions stem from your special knowledge of how we must think about God, following the rigid rules that govern all the different views of all theologians.

DAVID: dhw picks very a humanized God who has needs for entertainment in the free-for-all concept dhw offers. And dhw's God has to experiment which means his God is not all-powerful. In the discussion of the issue of boredom as a factor in our reality dhw's God does not wish to be bored. dhw's God is a Siamese twin with him

I do not even know if God exists, but I offer alternative versions to your own in order to eliminate the contradictions you try to gloss over. My versions never include the word “need”, and I have disowned the superficial word “entertainment”. I have deliberately incorporated terms you yourself have used, when you expressed your certainty that your God enjoyed creating and was interested in his creations. He doesn’t “have to” experiment, but in two of my versions he wants to experiment. I have nothing against the theory that God did not want to be bored, and I have nothing against your own belief that your God probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours. I only object when you then contradict yourself by telling us that he is “certainly not human in any sense”.