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

by dhw, Thursday, August 29, 2024, 09:17 (84 days ago) @ David Turell

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'.

dhw: 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”.

DAVID: I don't have it both ways. We don't know if God has any human attributes or wants to have them. He MAY simply create with no self-desires.

You are learning. Just stop telling us (a) that you reject deism because your God must care for us – which means you think he must have human attributes; b) that your God is not human in any way – which means he does not have any human attributes; c) that he may enjoy, be interested, care for us, want recognition and worship, but he can’t do so because he is selfless; d) that nothing in your thoughts is contradictory.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Did your parents produce you? The 99.9% are the producers of the 0.1% surviving.

Of course my parents produced me! How does that come to mean that 696 dinosaurs who died without descendants produced me and my contemporary species? See below for the next piece of nonsense.

dhw: […] 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.

dhw: Biochemistry “supports” all life forms. […] 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!

DAVID: That is what the Cambrian means.

Thank you. So the Cambrian means that 100% of pre-Cambrian life forms did not produce ANY of today’s species, just as the 696 out of 700 dinosaurs with no descendants did NOT produce ANY of today’s species, so please stop telling us that the 99.9% produced us and our contemporaries!

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

QUOTES (repeated, simce you keep ignoring them):

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.)

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

DAVID: Again, old quotes out of context. Old discussions of what God might do. We don't know if God cares for us. All of religion's assumptions have no basis.

All of the above quotes are very recent and directly contradictory, and none are “out of context”! What context could they possibly have other than your views of God, and why else would you confess to your beliefs being “schizophrenic”? Let’s now agree that we don’t know if God has human attributes, but “of course He may have them”. If he may have them, then please stop rejecting both your own proposals concerning enjoyment, interest, caring, wanting recognition etc. and also my alternative theories (free-for-all, experimentation), on the grounds that he does NOT have human attributes and that you KNOW he is selfless.