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

by dhw, Saturday, June 01, 2024, 08:24 (99 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You have accepted that it is not the meaning of the words that is in question, but their applicability to your God. Stop dodging.

DAVID: Finally, you understand.

dhw: But you’re still saying “We don’t know what they mean at His level”! You haven’t even understood what you pretend you wanted me to understand!

DAVID: It's fully understood from the beginning.

So let’s spell it out once and for all, taking worship as our example: when you said your God might want us to worship him, the answer did not depend on what meaning the word “worship” has for God, but on whether the statement does or does not apply to him – i.e. does he or does he not want us to worship him? Your self-contradictory answer is that although you think he might want us to worship him, he can’t want us to worship him because he has no self-interest.

DAVID: God produced us with no wishes for Himself, all covered before. Adler's way exists and I follow it, as described. One way.

dhw: […] I have no idea what Adler’s way is, since you keep telling us he is 50/50 neutral about God’s nature, and this supports your 100% rejection of any possible attribute that you happen to dislike.

DAVID: 50/50 is one point: does God listen to us?

Not so long ago it was “Does God care for us?” But if Adler doesn’t deal with other questions, please stop referring to him. It was you who said God might want us to worship him and who then said but he doesn’t because he has no self-interest.

DAVID: The rules to think about God are specific from Adler. How people invent God-think is not the subject.

dhw: Listen to yourself: “Everyone chooses the God he wishes to believe in.”
“There are as many forms of God as people invent him.”
(Re other theologians’ views of God:) “Their God is not my God as I describe him.”

Every “form of God” is based on how the believer thinks about God. Of course it’s the subject. And your way of thinking about God leads to one contradiction after another.

DAVID: A bunch of quotes out of context are not worth answering.

They are not out of context! The context is your insistence that the rules are specific, and you follow them. How can the rules be specific if other theologians believe in forms of God that are different from yours?

DAVID: Adler's instructions lead to no contradictions. Some of us follow Adler. What others think about God is of no consequence.

So all the millions of priests and bishops and imams and congregations past and present who believe God wants them to worship him are of no consequence! Is that what Adler told you? It's debatable whether Adler's 50/50 answer to “does God listen to us?" would cover God's wanting to be worshipped, but whether it does or doesn't, how can your 100% “no” constitute following Adler’s instructions?

Evolution
DAVID: The whole purpose was to evolve humans by a step-by-step method.

dhw: […] you would rather insult your God than consider the possibility that he WANTED the 100%, i.e. that his sole purpose was NOT just to create us plus food, but was to create precisely the history of life that we know: an ever changing succession of life forms. […]

DAVID: […] Everything in creation is God's work. Therefore, He evolved us by that cumbersome method we see. It was His choice to do it that way for His own reasons. Makes perfect sense to me if not to you.

dhw: It makes perfect sense if you leave out the problem which causes you to ridicule his method as messy, cumbersome and inefficient: namely your theory that humans plus food were his one and only goal from the start, and therefore he had to design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his one and only purpose. And you can’t think of any reason why. When will you stop dodging?

DAVID: Again, your distorted way of analyzing evolution by God. The unusual human endpoint is pure evidence of God's intent as creator using an evolutionary method.

If God exists, the whole history of life is pure evidence that he used an evolutionary method. It is not pure evidence of the totally illogical theory bolded above. When will you stop dodging?

DAVID: I've produced recent studies on the human brain. Do you see them as a natural event? Try seeing it through your distaste of human exceptionalism.

I have no distaste whatsoever for human exceptionalism. Every single natural wonder that you report can be seen as evidence of design – as you never cease to point out. But that does not explain the theory bolded above, with which you ridicule your God’s messiness, cumbersomeness and inefficiency rather than asking yourself whether perhaps he might have had a different reason for choosing evolution as his method.