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

by David Turell , Monday, August 26, 2024, 17:50 (21 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You constantly avoid my point: 'God cares' has a direct meaning for us, BUT as a supernatural personage we cannot know how He 'cares, if He does. Thus allegorical meanings appear.

dhw: When you ask whether he cares about us, you know precisely what you mean by the term – is he interested, does he have any feelings of goodwill towards us? Look at the above: “He must care…” And YOU actually told us that he is benevolent! The question is whether he does or does not have the feelings YOU mean when you talk of caring. “Allegorical” is meaningless here! Does he or does he not care for us according to our definition of “care”? Please stop this silly obfuscation.

You make the same point without the hated word.

DAVID: Your fertile mind runs wild. God is not a zombie. To repeat and hopefully open your mind to the real point: "You constantly avoid my point: 'God cares' has a direct meaning for us, BUT as a supernatural personage we cannot know how He 'cares, if He does. Thus allegorical meanings appear."

dhw: Dealt with above. Let’s have a straight answer: Do you or do you not believe that your God might possibly enjoy creating, be interested in his creations, care about us, want to be recognized and worshipped by us – all according to your own definition of each term?

Of course, God may be as you question me.

DAVID: He is not inefficient: He made a universe, created life, and His form of evolution created us, the most complex item in His universe. My problem is wondering why the Cambrian animals were directly created and then direct creation stopped.

dhw: That is not your only problem. You have claimed that your God deliberately created and then had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species both pre and post Cambrian that were irrelevant to the only purpose you allow him to have, although he was perfectly capable of creating species directly (as in the Cambrian). That is why you have called your perfect God’s method of achieving his goal imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient.

DAVID: Back to your distortion of Raup's statistics. The 99.9% are the direct ancestors of the surviving 0.1% which are here to support a huge human population.

This is becoming absurd. Once more:

dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all the creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From 0.1% surviving.

Example: 696 dinosaur species became extinct and had no descendants. 4 dinosaur species evolved into current species. How could the 696 dinosaurs have been direct ancestors of current species if they had no descendants?

I am describing a conglomerated statistic, while you stick to a tired single example of one hereditary line. 99.9% went extinct to produce 0.1% extant is an overall view!

Theodicy

dhw: Why do you think he wanted to test our brilliant brains? […]

DAVID: He gave us the brains which could help solve the problems. Test or challenge are appropriate thoughts.

dhw: So either your God was powerless to prevent the evil he had produced (he needed help), or he produced the evil to test whether we could “cure” it, and this proves that he is omniscient and all-good. [...]

dhw: Now please tell us why you think he would have wanted to challenge us by setting us a test? And if he did so, why would he not be interested in the result?

God might follow our actions.