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

by dhw, Saturday, June 29, 2024, 07:54 (145 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You ignore what I write. I have my personal theology built on instructions from a philosopher of religion.

dhw: So Adler instructed you to tell us that your God is an imperfect, messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer, did he? Well even if he did, that doesn’t make it true, and it doesn’t make it conform to the views of all theologians.

DAVID: Why must it conform? I am not 'monkey-see, monkey-do'.

You have repeatedly dismissed my theistic alternatives with such remarks as: “You don’t know how to think about God in true theological ways” as if only you knew the “true” theological way. Look at this exchange on yesterday’s “more miscellany” thread, referring to your certainty that your God is not human “in any way”:

dhw: […] to hell with all those theologians who are certain, for instance, that God loves us and wants us to worship him.

DAVID: My personal theology is mine. I follow Adler and Aquinas only.

How can you then complain that my alternative and highly efficient versions of your God’s handling of evolution are wrong because I don’t know how to think about God “in true theological ways”, whereas you proudly offer us an inefficient God and ridicule any theologian who thinks God loves us and wants us to worship him, because your personal theology is that your God certainly is not human in any way.

"Allegory" and Human attributes

DAVID: Simple: Worship at our level may not have the same meaning as applied to God's wishes about worship.

dhw: “Worship” means to show respect, love, appreciation, gratitude etc at any level.

DAVID: No!!! We do not know how God interprets/treats our word 'worship'.

dhw: The question is whether God does or doesn’t want us to do this. And you accepted that "it is not the meaning of the words that is in question, but their applicability to God.” Stop dodging.

DAVID: Yes, we agree. What is your problem?

My problem is that in your first comment and your “No!!!” response, God might not speak English, whereas you finish by agreeing that the question is whether he does or does not want us to worship him. And you keep popping in the word “allegorically” (see below), though you haven’t a clue what your Adler meant by it.

DAVID: Now twisting the meaning of neutral as I applied it to Adler. Adler is agnostic about God's personality. Neutral=taking neither side.

dhw: Precisely, but you have stated that your God is “certainly not human in any way” – which means God has no human attributes, the very opposite of “neutral”! Stop twisting yourself in knots!

DAVID: Your mental knots! God may have allegorically determined human attributes, OR He may not. Adler: God is a personage like no other person.

A bad choice of words. A “personage” is a very important human being. God cannot possibly be any kind of human being, but that does not mean he can’t have attributes in common with human beings, as Adler clearly agrees, since he remains neutral on the subject. Meanwhile, if your God is “certainly not human in any way”, he cannot possibly have any human attributes, so you disagree with Adler and continue to tie yourself in knots.

God’s purpose

DAVID: […] an omniscient God chose the best system to create humans and it worked. To our human brains it looks cumbersome, but apparently not to God.

dhw: You keep insisting that you know your unknowable God started out with the sole intention of creating humans and he decided to choose a messy, inefficient way to do it. Here are two alternatives which are not imperfect, messy, cumbersome or inefficient: God chose the best system to create a free-for-all, and it worked. God chose to experiment with his new invention and see what different forms of life he could create, and it worked. Why do you insist that your theory of imperfection and inefficiency is the only possible theistic explanation of evolution?

DAVID: Yours is not theistic, just humanizing God who doesn't control all processes.

Why is it less god-like to want the vast variety of species that come and go than it is to design 99/9% of them and then to have to cull them because they are not the ones he wanted?

dhw: Do you think your God deliberately sent the asteroid that killed [the dinosaurs]?

DAVID: Schroeder, an orthodox Jewish theoretical physicist, guessed God used the asteroid. I'll stick with that. God culled the dinosaurs.

dhw: A good illustration, then, of your God’s decision to design and then cull 99.9% of species that had no connection with the one and only purpose you impose on him – a choice which YOU consider to be imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient.

DAVID: I consider an omniscient God chose the system, as above.

Yes, I know: this only adds to the absurdity – that your God actually knew he was using an imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient system, and to make matters worse, according to you he also knew that he was perfectly capable of creating species “de novo”, without having to design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species. Daft!