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

by dhw, Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 11:06 (2 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: […] 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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Any being can have patterns like us, as my dog example you've dismissed. You try to incorrectly humanize God.

Of course our fellow animals have thought patterns and emotions like ours. So are you now going to accuse yourself of humanizing your dog??? Your example supports the case that “of course he [God] may have human-like attributes”. That does not mean he is a human being, any more than your dog’s “patterns” make him human! So please stop this nonsense about “humanizing” God.

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.

dhw: So please stop all this nonsense about “allegory”.

DAVID: Adler touts allegorical. Who is your expert?

You have agreed with what I have just written. Adler is irrelevant. As regards experts, there are millions of believers who think their God wants us to recognize and worship him. They have built churches, synagogues, cathedrals and mosques, while priests, vicars, rabbis, imams and even scientists and theologians go there precisely for that purpose. Try telling them that your God can’t possibly want us to worship him because he is selfless.

99.9% v 0.1%

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

dhw: Please give us a quote in which Raup says extinct species "produced" us plus our food. […] 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!

DAVID: NUTS! Species go extinct leaving behind new living species. It is how evolution works.

Which of your bolded statements is NUTS? I asked you for a quote to support your distortion of Raup. No quote forthcoming. Once again: when species become extinct, they cannot possibly produce anything. You agree that we and our contemporaries are descended from the 0.1% that have survived all the extinctions and not from the 99.9% of all the creatures that have ever lived, you tell us that for 3,000,000,000 years, NONE of the species were our ancestors, since these were created “de novo” by your God during the Cambrian, and you now tell us that 100% of dinosaurs failed to produce a single current descendant. And yet you go on contradicting yourself by claiming that we are descended from (were produced by) the 99.9% and not the 0.1%. Please stop it.

Theodicy

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'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.
And:
DAVID: Nothing resembles a free-for-all which you desire to entertain your humanized God. Life comes with a freedom-of-action requirement. Which means free to have bad results. IT CAN'T WORK ANY OTHER WAY. Accept it.

Bugs are free to kill us, humans are free to design all sorts of evil, and “life is free to have bad results”, but nothing resembles a free-for-all! It was you who suggested that a Garden of Eden would be boring. You have also proposed that your all-powerful God is incapable of correcting all the mistakes for which you blame him (Quote: "What is fair is to blame God for natural disasters: earthquakes, terrible storms and bugs causing diseases.") and needs our help. And life can only work if there is a free-for-all. As an added bonus, this would explain all the different species that have come and gone. No more of this nonsense about your God messily and inefficiently designing and having to cull the 99.9% of species that were irrelevant to his one and only purpose of designing us and our food.