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

by dhw, Sunday, July 07, 2024, 08:43 (103 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: […] 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. […]

DAVID: God is free to do as He wishes.

Of course.

DAVID: An omniscient God must know our meaning, but He may not view it as we do.

Under “microbes in trees”, you referred to the nasty microbiomes whose presence we must accept, and you commented “A benevolent God did this, fully understanding the consequences.” You did not mean that YOU thought he might not be kind and caring. It was simply another instance of your Jekyll (Mr Nice Guy) telling your Mr Hyde (Mr Nasty Guy) that God is nice, which somehow exonerates him from deliberately and knowingly designing nasty bugs.

DAVID: That is the conundrum'. You are arguing at our human level of understanding.

That is the only level we want to know! Does he or doesn’t he care? Is he or is he not benevolent? Does he or does he not want us to worship him? All in our sense of the words.

DAVID: We have no way of knowing if God views our wishes consistent with His thoughts or even cares (Adler: 50/50).

Correct. If he exists, we do not and cannot know what he wants or what he is like. There is no “allegory” and the problem is perfectly straightforward until we start to formulate theories. In your case, the theories lead to blatant contradictions, as exemplifed above and below, because you "first choose a form of God [you] wish to believe in. The rest follows."

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?

DAVID:We is us. We know my dichotomy.

Only too well, and I would have thought that the absurd contradictions resulting from your “dichotomy” would make you at least open your mind to the possibility that something might be wrong with your theories, and there might be other explanations of the history of life that do not entail such absurdities. For instance, you were once certain that your God enjoyed creating. Why then is it not possible that at least one purpose behind his creation of the great variety of creatures extant and extinct was the enjoyment of creating them? But no, not for you: he certainly enjoys creating, and "of course he may have human-like attributes", but he is certainly not human in any way and therefore he can’t have any human-like attributes.