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

by dhw, Saturday, September 07, 2024, 08:27 (9 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If your God exists, he does not mimic us, and we do not mimic him! He would have created us with some of his own characteristics. You say he is not human in any way, but “of course he may have human-like attributes”, and you still can’t see that you are contradicting yourself. Your next statement simply omits your fixed and firm belief that your God is not human in any way:

DAVID: God creates with no needs for Himself. It is obvious to declare God is not human, but possibly has some human-like attributes. These are rules I follow.

dhw: Firstly, we are not talking about “needs” but about possible purposes which you yourself have proposed for his creation of life and us: enjoyment, interest, a desire to have a relationship, to be recognized and worshipped. But I have pointed out to you that your own proposals are contradicted by your insistence that he is selfless, whereas these purposes denote self-interest.

DAVID: My proposals that God wishes this or that does not remove the concept of selflessness. They are human wishes for a relationship that may or may not matter to God. No proof of God's self-interest as you illogically propose.

It was YOU who proposed that he might want to be recognized and worshipped! And then you rejected your own proposal by insisting that your God is selfless! Another of your proposals was that he enjoys creating and is interested in his creations. But you reject my proposal that enjoyment of creating things that would interest him might be the reason why he designed life in the first place, again because you believe him to be selfless. Then, having rejected my proposal, you claim that you “reject nothing”, and “we don’t know if God seeks self-satisfaction”, although you know that he doesn’t because he has no self-interest! There is no “proof” even that God exists, let alone of what are his purposes, methods, and nature. And as above, your self-contradictions include your rigid principle that your God is not human in any way (so you reject my alternative theories of evolution), but at the same time “of course he may have human-like attributes”. Hence your own diagnosis of your beliefs as “schizophrenic”.

DAVID: Your contorted logic sees a schizophrenia that is non-existent. I am appealing to God for a relationship He may not wish to have or NEED to have.

It is your consistent self-contradictions that led YOU to use the term schizophrenic. I don’t recall you “appealing to God for a relationshio”; the discussion has been about your belief that your God may have created us because HE wanted a relationship with US.

99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: You are contorting Raup's overall statistical analysis. In all of evolution 99.9% of all organisms went extinct to produce 0.1% now surviving. Your sliver of dinosaurs to birds is a miniscule myopic fraction of the whole picture.

Over and over and over again you repeat your distortion of Raup to claim that the 99.9% of extinct forms “produced” the 0.1% of extant species. Once more: the 99.9% of extinct species include our ancestors, but they themselves were produced by the 0.1% of survivors from all the extinctions, as you have agreed:
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.

Why do you keep contradicting yourself? Furthermore, your own interpretation of evolution’s history is that 100% of pre-Cambrian species were NOT our ancestors (because you claim that our ancestors were created “de novo” during the Cambrian), and we have a vivid example of how Raup’s figures work, through the 696 out of 700 dinosaur species that had no descendants, although you have mysteriously calculated that 4 survivors out of 700 = 99.9%. What makes you think that this process was reversed after the Cambrian, and that the dinosaurs were an exception to your dotty assumption that species without descendants produce new species?

Theodicy

dhw [...] do you now wish to retract your theory that he created evil in order to test/challenge us?

DAVID: I can't withdraw it as a possibility, considering the amazing brain He gave us. God did not create evil! IT is all side effects of His good works.

dhw: The theory that they are all “side effects” does not exonerate him from being their creator. And if his intention was to test/challenge us with all the bad bacteria, viruses, floods, famines etc, then he could only have created them deliberately!

DAVID: Deliberately created to do good, but with bad side effects. You can't have the good without the bad.

I accept the fact that good may result from correcting bad. But you have proposed that your all-good God created bad as a challenge/test for us humans. Nothing to do with “side effects”. That is the theory I am now querying. If you don’t wish to retract it, please explain why you think your God wanted to test us.