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

by David Turell , Saturday, July 06, 2024, 15:52 (138 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Of course I do! What we mean by benevolent may not have the same meaning at the God level. We do not know how our words relate to God. An omniscient God must know our meaning, but He may not view it as we do. That is the conundrum.

dhw: This is getting silly. We want to know if he is benevolent, i.e. has goodwill towards us, wants to be kind and helpful. How many more adjectives do you need? We don’t want to know if he has a different concept of benevolence; we simply want to know if he has OUR concept of benevolence. Supposing, for example, he thinks that being benevolent means designing bugs to cause us endless pain and suffering so that he can enjoy watching us scream in agony, then as far as WE are concerned, he is not benevolent. You thought he might want us to worship him (= love, respect, praise, thank him) – not if he thought the word “worship” might mean to deny his existence, blame him for his evil nature, or call him an imperfectly, messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer.

God is free to do as He wishes. 'An omniscient God must know our meaning, but He may not view it as we do. That is the conundrum'. You are arguing at our human level of understanding. We have no way of knowing if God views our wishes consistent with His thoughts or even cares (Adler: 50/50).

DAVID: […] I see His use of evolution as a cumbersome choice. But we arrived, so why complain?

dhw: You have totally ignored all of the above, which responds to your admission that you are a Jekyll and Hyde, which explains all the absurd contradictions that make nonsense of your theories. The very fact that you see your perfect, omnipotent, omniscient God as the designer of an imperfect, inefficient system (your adjectives, not mine) illustrates the confusion caused by your two conflicting identities. This was an honest acknowledgement of your own confusion and of the contradictions I listed earlier. Please don’t start trying to cover it all up again.

DAVID: we don't need to.

dhw: Who are “we”? Your blatant self-contradictions are caused by your inability to match what you wish your God to be with what your analytical reasoning tells you he might be. Hence your God probably has human-like attributes but cannot possibly have human-like attributes etc. etc. Do you want me to repeat the list?

We is us. We know my dichotomy.