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

by David Turell @, Saturday, June 29, 2024, 19:16 (145 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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.

It is Adler's theology I have adopted and used. You don't recognize your travesty of your humanized God.


"Allegory" and Human attributes

dhw: 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.

I fully know how Adler used the word 'allegorically'.


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.

dhw: 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.

Adler used the word as quoted. Any human attributes must be applied allegorically to God.


God’s purpose

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

dhw: 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?

Another distortion of evolution. They are culled in the evolution of more complex desired forms. It is a developmental system!!!

DAVID: I consider an omniscient God chose the system.

dhw: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!

Yes, you are daft. Only you can outthink God! An omniscient God picked the best system to create humans. Your brain is better than God's? No way.

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