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

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 17, 2024, 20:25 (1 day, 20 hours, 28 min. ago) @ dhw

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

DAVID: Adler touts allegorical. Who is your expert?

dhw: 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.

So you follow no expert in theology. We are not experts ourselves.

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.

dhw: 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.

Amazing. Evolution is a process in which species go extinct leaving behind advanced living species. Stop slicing the process into bits!!! Yes, there are some dead ends, but generally extinct leave descendants.

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.

dhw: 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.

The 99.9% provided what is on Earth today for our use through their descendants.