More miscellany (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, June 29, 2024, 19:42 (70 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: Except that Adler doesn’t cover your daft theory of evolution, and he is neutral on the subject of human attributes, whereas you are certain that your God has none.

Please try to remember my prior quotes. Adler used Darwin evolution in his proof of God. Human attributes can be treated allegorically when applied to God

God’s “challenge”

dhw: Interesting for us or for him? You are still lumbered with your theory that your all-powerful, all-knowing God knowingly created ways in which to make us suffer. Hardly commensurate with your vision of an all-good God. And do you really believe that we would find life less interesting without the pain and misery your God deliberately created for us?

DAVID: Theodicy answered before. The greater good comes with a small portion of bad.

dhw: And so we should ignore, for example, the flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918, because they were only a small portion compared to the people that didn’t get the flu. The evil that your God allowed or created is real, and that is why the subject of theodicy arose in the first place. You don’t solve the problem by trying to ignore it.

Never ignored. I first entered Theodicy here.

Giraffes

DAVID: You most look at the total history of God's evolutionary works. Giraffes fit into their ecosystem.

dhw; All life forms throughout the history of life “fit into their ecosystem” until – according to you – their God decides to wreck the system and/or to cull 99.9% of the life forms that made up that system.

Another of your distortions of evolutionary history. Evolution is a developmental stepwise process of creating desired forms from previous ones. Not the destructive distortion you use.

Theoretical origin of life: Need for repair

dhw: I agree. This is the case against atheism. Just as it requires blind faith to believe in the existence of a supreme, unknown and unknowable form of conscious mind that created the universe and the cell, and has simply existed for ever, without any source. Hence agnosticism. (dhw’s bold).

DAVID: Yes, your illogical position as always.

dhw: Why “illogical”? You say your Adler remained agnostic or neutral on the subject of God’s human attributes because God is unknowable. I remain neutral on the subject of God’s existence because no one can possibly know the truth about something unknowable.

Fair enough.

Trilobites

DAVID: I would remind the reader this large population has no predecessors. They represent the Cambrian Gap.

dhw: And apparently they have no direct descendants, so apparently instead of directly designing the only things he wanted to design (humans plus food), he directly designed and then had to cull trilobites. Talk about messy and cumbersome and inefficient…

Thank you for recognizing my theology. Yes, trilobites are a dead end but: " The closest living relatives (but not direct descendants) of trilobites are the chelicerates (a group of arthropods that contains animals such as horseshoe crabs, sea spiders, and arachnids (spiders, scorpions, etc.)."

https://www.activewild.com/trilobites/#descendants

The Trilobites played a major role in the Cambrian ecosystem. Only God knows why.