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

by dhw, Wednesday, September 04, 2024, 08:45 (12 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I rejected nothing. We don't know if God seeks self-satisfaction. My proposals you listed are human wishes for God. WE DO NOT KNOW IF THEY ARE APPLICABLE.

dhw: Apart from your “selfless” God, none of the above are human wishes. They are simply theories concerning his possible reasons for creating life and us. This is a red letter day in the history of the AgnosticWeb! At last you now accept the possibility that your God may act out of self-interest and other human-like attributes instead of sticking to (I quote:) your “rigid principle; God is not human in any way.” You have therefore not rejected the possibility that he created a free-for-all because he enjoys creating and watches his creations with interest, or that he experiments in order to make new discoveries ...And we shall never again hear you complain that alternative theories to your own are nonsense because they “humanize” your God, since you now recognize that your non-human God might well have human characteristics.

DAVID: I won't stop complaining about your humanly imagined God as described above now in red. That God is not human in any way is an obvious point made strongly by Adler. Since God made us as thinking beings, we must reflect Him in some unknown ways.

And still you can’t see that you are contradicting yourself! If he is not human in any way, how can we reflect him in some ways?

DAVID: My guesses, you have listed above, ARE human wishes for relationship with God, not simply reasons for our creation.

They were your proposals concerning his purpose for creating life and us. Why would we WISH he would enjoy creating, or would want us to recognize and worship him. i.e. that he would act out of self-interest? But since you wish him to be selfless, you have rejected your own proposals. You have also rejected mine on the grounds that God is not human in any way, although “of course he may have human-like attributes”, but “nothing in [your] thoughts is contradictory” and you “reject nothing”, except that you reject any theory that entails human attributes which he may have but can’t have. And you yourself have diagnosed your beliefs as “schizophrenic”.

99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: Thank you for repeating Raup! 99.9% extinct with 0.1% lucky survivors. No slivers of dinosaur productions to birds needed or in any way applicable to Raup's overall statistics.

It is your distortion of his statistics that underlies your evolution theory that your God designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species in order to produce the only species he wanted to design. Hence your ridicule of his method as imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient. You also want us to believe that every species he designed during the 3,000,000,000 pre-Cambrian years was irrelevant to his purpose, and eventually you will agree that 4 dinosaur ancestors species out of 700 does not = 99.9% ancestors. And perhaps you will also agree with yourself when you reread the following exchange:

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.

DAVID: Mammals lived with dinosaurs and became us after many extinctions, another sliver of overall evolution.

Correct. And if Raup is right, the figure after each extinction would have been about 99.9% loss and 0.1% surviving, and as you have agreed, above, we are descended from the 0.1% surviving, not from the 99.9% that had no descendants.

Theodicy

DAVID: My view is God knew all of the eventual side effects and knew we could solve the problems on our own.

dhw: We still have a long way to go, as millions continue to suffer and die. Why do you think he wanted to test/challenge us with these murderous problems? It’s no answer to say that he knew we would eventually pass the test! Why “test” us in the first place? […]

DAVID: The side effects are a challenge to us with or without God.

But the theory you proposed was that your God deliberately designed the non-human evils as a challenge or test. Do you now wish to retract that theory?

DAVID: I cannot get your brain to understand that living biochemistry involves freely-acting molecules proforming functions at trillions of times a second throughout our bodies. It is a way that makes life exist. We know of no other way, so it must be the only way. It will have mistakes, a point noted by God who has editing systems throughout. You are here, a normal human like 99.9% of all humans. An impressive result for your imagined bumbling God who can't make it perfect!

I have no objection at all to the theory that your God gave molecules, bacteria, viruses and humans the freedom to commit what we call evil. If you want to tell us that your all-powerful, all-knowing God had no choice with regard to the molecules, then OK. We still have the bacteria, viruses, meteors, floods, famines and human evils to deal with, which at one time you stated were your God’s fault. Meanwhile, do you now wish to retract your theory that he created evil in order to test/challenge us?