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

by dhw, Monday, September 16, 2024, 13:05 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: All of our evidence is secondary by studying our reality He produced.

dhw: “Secondary” means not as important as something else, so I have no idea what you’re referring to. I only know you have again dodged your confession that your starting point is the God you want, which means you either ignore any evidence against your wishes, or you plunge into one contradiction after another.

DAVID: We do not know God directly, thus all of reality is secondary evidence. Yes, I start with the God I've described: purposeful, selfless, all-everything, with the goal to produce humans. The evolutionary method over time troubles me, but I accept it as God's choice of method.

Your “selfless” contradicts your belief that he enjoys creating, and might have created us because he wants us to recognize him and worship him. Your belief that he is benevolent contradicts your belief that there is only a 50/50 chance that he cares for us. Your belief that he is not human in any way contradicts your belief that he probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours. Your belief that he is all-good and all-powerful contradicts your belief that he is to blame for the bad bugs, and can’t control them but needs help to correct the mistakes he can’t correct. And your anthropocentric theory of evolution troubles you so much that you ridicule your all-knowing, perfect God as an imperfect, messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer.

DAVID: Please read with understanding: God is not human in any way but can exhibit human characteristics in some allegorical way. Perfectly logical.

“Not human in any way” means he cannot have any human characteristics, so how can he “exhibit” characteristics he doesn’t have? You agree that he probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours. There is no “allegory”, as you admit in the following exchange:

dhw: Either your God cares or he doesn’t, wants us to worship him or doesn’t, enjoys designing or doesn’t - all according to what we understand by those terms.

DAVID: […] Our meaning may not be God's.

dhw: The words are our invention, we know what we mean, and we want to know whether any of these terms are applicable to God “according to what we understand by those terms”.

DAVID: Acceptable.

So please stop all this nonsense about “allegory”.

99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: No dinosaurs were our ancestors. The Cambrians used Ediacaran biochemistry, no phenotypic forms.

dhw: If 100% of dinosaurs were not our ancestors, and if your God created our ancestors “de novo” during the Cambrian (= 100% no pre-Cambrian ancestors), this makes nonsense of your claim that the 99.9% “produced” us and our food. Please stop it.

DAVID: Stop slicing up evolution. The 99.9% and the 0.1% represent all of evolution.

Evolution is sliced up into different periods, based on geology and paleontology (e.g. extinctions of species). You don’t hesitate to use the Cambrian slice as evidence that your God produced our ancestors “de novo”, so please stop moaning about slices. These are examples of the process.

DAVID: The 99.9% produced the 0.1% now surviving. Pure Raup interpretation.

Please give us a quote in which Raup says extinct species "produced" us plus our food. All you have told us is that there have been 99.9% losses and 0.1% survivals, and you have agreed that we and our contemporary species are descended from the 0.1% and NOT from the 99.9%. Pure common sense, since species which become extinct will not be able to produce anything!

Theodicy

Under “Editing DNA mistakes” and “Bacterial intelligence”

DAVID: Why would a benevolent God deliberately create the chaos of a murderous free-for-all? (dhw's bold)

dhw: […] the new answer to the bolded question is that you start with the God you want, and since you want your God to be “benevolent”, that means we shouldn’t bother to ask why he created the murderous bacteria, viruses, “natural disasters” and humans.

DAVID: I 'bothered' to raise this issue!!! I've given the answers that satisfy me. Life -giving free-floating proteins under loose controls can make mistakes, good bugs free to enter into bad places, life-giving plate tectonics making earthquakes, etc. all described previously. God's good MUST come with bad side-effects.

Yes, you raised the issue again with your bolded question above. Now you tell us your all-knowing, all-powerful God knowingly gave proteins the ability to make mistakes and bugs the ability to kill us, and relied on us to help him “cure” the ills he couldn’t control. (He also knowingly gave us the freedom to do our own murderous deeds.) He is benevolent but powerless to prevent the evil he has created. Earlier, as above, you wrote that the good outweighed the bad, so we shouldn’t ask the bolded question at all! You have also written: "What is fair is to blame God for natural disasters: earthquakes, terrible storms and bugs causing diseases." Your blame hardly coincides with benevolence. And let’s not forget the earlier answer that he didn’t want a “Garden of Eden” because that would have been boring. A free-for-all is much more interesting than a puppet show. Don’t you agree with that one?