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

by dhw, Thursday, September 12, 2024, 11:46 (7 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: In imagining a God, one sets up a God with certain characteristics like selflessness. Then one guesses His reasons such as interest, recognition, caring, worship etc. These do not negate God's selflessness as they represent human desires and they offer God possible relationships He may or may not desire. God did not create us for His enjoyment. Why do you continuously humanize God!

Your view of God as selfless is your wish and is no more and no less a guess than your list of God’s “reasons”. Among your own proposals, only “caring” and “interest” represent a human desire. Why would we “desire” him to recognize and worship him? Your own guesses included God’s enjoyment of creating, and indeed why would he do it if he didn’t enjoy it? I do not “humanize” God. If he exists, I want to know about his nature and purposes, and you have agreed that “of course he may have human-like attributes”. Since he is supposed to have created us, that doesn’t “humanize” him – it “deifies” us! Why do you continuously agree that he may have such attributes, and then schizophrenically deny that he might have them?

99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: The 99.9% extinct species produced the 0.1% now living.(dhw’s bold)

dhw: Let me repeat the unequivocal statement you keep forgetting:

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.

dhw: Please tell us how the 99.9% could have “produced” us if we are only descended from the 0.1% that survived.

DAVID: Per Raup: 99.9% extinct resulted in the current 0.1% surviving. We are among the 0.1% as representatives of the surviving. Specific dinosaurs are beside the point and worthless examples of the total lumped statistics.

dhw: […] Do you now wish to tell us that your “No. From 0.1% surviving” was a mistake, and you meant: “Yes. From 99.9%”? And why do you think your pre-Cambrian theory and the dinosaur facts are worthless examples of the statistic that 99.9% of species are extinct and only 0.1% survived?

DAVID: Why do you split evolution into tiny segments to fight Raup's statistics which are just an overall view. I am a survivor; I came from the 0.1% survivors who came from the 99.9% extinct.

I’m not fighting Raup’s statistics but your self-contradictory distortion of them. You agree we are NOT descended from the 99.9% of extinct species but only from the 0.1% survivors of each extinction, but you insist that we ARE descended from the 99.9% of extinct species, which “produced” us although they had no descendants! Only 0.1% - the survivors of each extinction - “produced” us. The two examples based on your own beliefs CONFIRM Raup’s overall statistics (you say 100% of pre-Cambrian species were not our ancestors, and we know that 99.4% of dinosaurs were not our ancestors). Why do you reject your own examples, which confirm Raup’s statistics?

Theodicy

dhw: please explain why you think your God wanted to test us.

DAVID: […] If God tried to change the freedom of action of molecules life could not exist, as explained before. Of course He needs our help.

dhw: So despite his omnipotence, he can’t undo the evil he didn’t want, and he needs our help to do what he can’t do. The test is to see if we can be cleverer than him. Sounds to me more like a weak human than an almighty God. And yet you reckon a God who experiments, or deliberately creates a free-for-all, is weaker than a God who needs help from humans to correct the mistakes he can’t cope with.

DAVID: You are so confused with your humanized God. See editing:

See above for your confusion concerning “humanizing”. Please tell me why an experimenting God who gets what he wants is weaker than a God who needs human help to correct the mistakes arising from the system he created.

Editing DNA mistakes and Bacterial intelligence

DAVID: The molecules have instructions but no tight controls […] They make mistakes in action, not meaning to. […].

dhw: So although they survive by killing us, they don't mean to, and your all-knowing, all-powerful God tries to correct their mistakes, but fails so miserably that he relies on us to do what he can’t do.

DAVID: A terrible distortion of the truth. Will you never learn life cannot exist without free-floating molecules under a plethora of influences. Mistakes will happen.

Mistakes which your omnipotent God tries in vain to correct, and tests us to help him do what he can’t do. In the context of theodicy, why do you try to restrict the discussion to molecules? You are still left with the problem of murderous viruses and bacteria, so-called natural disasters, and human evil, so why do you reject the possibility that your God might have created a free-for-all in which life forms have the freedom to design their/our own means of survival, whether these entail success, failure, kill or cure?