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

by David Turell , Wednesday, June 26, 2024, 17:32 (148 days ago) @ dhw

: > dhw: Your theology teaches you to ridicule God, and you keep telling me I don’t know how to think about God and I am out of touch with theology!

You don't assimilate what I write. Again, God chose a cumbersome system from His omniscience that it was the best way to create us. He managed it very well in the end. we are here.

Human attributes

DAVID (Sunday) [...] Of course, He may have human attributes.

DAVID: What are you smoking. I fully understand Adler's use of allegorical.

dhw: Last week I asked you to define the word and tell us the difference between “God may want us to worship him” and “Allegorically God may want us to worship him.” Your reply was:
DAVID: I am sure Adler knew the meaning of allegorical when he said to use it.
Now please tell us what he meant, or stop hiding behind your smokescreen.

Repeat: Adler said we must use words describing God allegorically.

dhw: You can no longer reject my alternative theistic theories on the grounds that they involve human-like attributes. You are of course welcome to stick to the inefficient God you wish to believe in.

DAVID: Of course I reject your humanized God.

dhw: You reject a God who has certain “human-like attributes”. Please tell us if Adler or any other theologians think of God as being an imperfect and inefficient designer, and how many theologians believe that their God – who is “certainly not human in any way” – is incapable of loving us and does not want us to worship him.

Of course, they do, and I accept Adler's neutral position.

Fungi (and bacteria)

DAVID: [...] God's main purpose was to create us and our resources.

dhw: “Main”? You have been unable to give us any other purposes, and it is once more utterly absurd to assume that your God specially designed every ecosystem for the last 3.8 billion years for the sole purpose of creating us and our resources.

DAVID: […] Who is running the Earth? Us! How come? Our God-given brains.

dhw: How does that prove that your God’s sole purpose for creating and culling 3+ billion years’ worth of species and ecosystems was to produce us?

We are a most extraordinary result of a natural process; therefore, God designed us. No other explanation fits.

99.9% versus 0.1%

dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

DAVID: (referring to today’s species) [...] all direct descendants from the 99.9% extinct.

dhw: Now you turn yourself upside down and say all the survivors ARE direct descendants, and you ignore the dinosaur example we agreed on in the first place as an illustration of the percentage of species that were NOT our ancestors.

DAVID: If birds descended from Dinosaurs and we descended from tiny mammals of that same period, what is your problem? Each 0.1% line now here had extinctions to get here, all adding up to Raup's 99.9% lumped extinction rate.

dhw: This is getting farcical. Raup’s 99.9% extinction rate includes the vast proportion of species that did not lead to us plus our food. We plus food are descended – as you have so rightly agreed – from the 0.1% of survivors. Of course most of the 0.1% ancestors are also extinct – e.g. the 4 species of dinosaurs from which birds are descended – but they are a tiny proportion of the species that did not lead to us plus food, e.g. the 696 species of dinosaurs that had no descendants. Please tell us why your God designed and had to cull 696 species of dinosaur that had no connection with us, if we and our food were his one and only purpose. Your answer so far: God is an imperfect messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer. And I should read Adler, although he never mentions your ridiculous theory of evolution.

Adler would educate you. As for the required extinctions, they are the natural result of evolution.