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

by dhw, Wednesday, August 28, 2024, 10:53 (19 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Of course, God may be as you question me.

dhw: Thank you. They were all your own suggestions. Of course I agree with your “may be”. Your claim elsewhere that your God is selfless is also a “may be”, but it conflicts with these agreed possibilities and leaves wide open the question of your God’s purpose in creating life and especially humans. This leads us to your theory of evolution.

DAVID: Please understand 'selfless' as I view it for God. God does not create to satisfy any underlying personal 'need'. This does not mean God cannot be approached directly or indirectly as Himself, or as a 'self'.

I know the meaning of selfless. Doing things for enjoyment, caring, and even wanting recognition in the form of worship are not “needs”. Your God is not going to collapse or die without them. You have agreed that all of them are possible. But most of them are NOT “selfless”. You can’t have it both ways, which is why you have labelled your own beliefs “schizophrenic”.

dhw: 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. […] Do you now accept that at least part of your theory may be wrong, and that the 99.9% “may be” part of his possible enjoyment of a free-for-all, or of experimenting to make new discoveries, or to create a being with thought patterns and emotions like his own? (All perfectly efficient means of achieving his goal.)

DAVID: I find your interpretation of Raup's statistics as a total corruption of Raup's meaning. All Raup said was 99.9% went extinct to produce 0.1% surviving. In my terms 'cumbersome' or 'roundabout'. Your humanizing of God is rejected.

It is you who have totally corrupted Raup, according to your own presentation of his theory on April 21st: “His study was to explain why extinctions happened as a necessary part of evolution. He concluded ‘bad luck’. Well adapted species suddenly were unprepared for new circumstances. The losses cumulatively were 99.9% with 0.1% as survivors.” Nowhere does he say that the 99.9% PRODUCED the survivors! They died out because they were unlucky enough to be unprepared for change. And you agreed that the 99.9% were NOT the ancestors of current species, which descended from the 0.1% of survivors.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: I am describing a conglomerated statistic, while you stick to a tired single example of one hereditary line.

dhw: The “tired example” is directly relevant to us and our contemporaries. You are simply tired of being reminded that only 4 out of 700 dinosaur species “produced” descendants that are alive today. You also forget your claim that we and our contemporary species are directly descended from species your God designed “de novo” during the Cambrian. This means that according to you, not even one form of life for 3,000,000,000 years prior to the Cambrian could have been our direct ancestor. Please stop shooting yourself in the foot with your self-contradictions.

DAVID: "De novo" means no ancestors!!! The Cambrian had no predecessors! I have assumed Ediacaran biochemistry supported Cambrian forms.

Biochemistry “supports” all life forms. Thank you for emphasizing my point with all your exclamation marks. You claim that we and our contemporary species are descended from species that had no ancestors. This means that for 3,000,000,000 years prior to the Cambrian, not one of the species your God designed led to us and our contemporaries. Not even 0.1% of them!

Theodicy

dhw: […] 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?

DAVID: God might follow our actions.

dhw: Why would he challenge us with a test if he was not interested in our response to the test? But maybe he didn’t create them as a test. Maybe he let them create themselves in a free-for-all, and doesn’t care if they kill us. (See your Adler’s 50/50, which you agree with but disagree with.)

DAVID: I'm with Adler. We don't know if God cares for us.

QUOTES:
DAVID: I reject deism. God made us. He must care about the results. (= He cares for us.)
DAVID: God is not human in any way. (= He can’t care for us.)
DAVID: Of course He may have human-like attributes (= He can care for us.)

You have rightly labelled your beliefs as “schizophrenic”. And this is made painfully clear by your statement that “nothing in my thoughts is contradictory”!