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

by dhw, Saturday, October 05, 2024, 08:22 (13 days ago) @ David Turell

Contradictions

DAVID: Stop assuming my guesses about God are 100% fact or true as you constantly proclaim. God is selfless and whether He wishes these relationships or not is unknown. They remain as human wishes.

dhw: I make no such assumption. Nothing is “known”. And that applies to your theory that God exists and is “selfless”. You also theorize that your God is interested in us and may want us to worship him. But you then refuse to accept that IF these theories are correct, your theory of “selfnessness” must be incorrect. […]

DAVID: You have again listed my human wishes for God. As my thinking and study about God have progressed, we have looked at God as selfless which only means He creates without thoughts about Himself. Your complaints come from your insistence upon a very human form of God.

I have no idea why you think that a God who creates out of interest and may wish to be worshipped can’t be true, except for the fact that you wish him to be selfless. I complain because YOU keep contradicting yourself ( I have given you a long list elsewhere). even to the point of ridiculing your perfect designer as imperfect and inefficient. I offer alternative theistic explanations of evolution which show your God to be efficiently creating what he wants to create. Why is that more human than your inefficient God, who you think probably has human-like thought patterns and emotions but can’t have them because he is not human in any way, although your dog also has human-like thought patterns and emotions but is not human?

DAVID: Karen Anderson's book describes an OT God as angry, the NT God as loving, and the Koran God as creating 'works' in describing how human thought about God developed. That sounds like a selfless God to me in the Koran.

It would seem that Karen Anderson is aware that nobody knows the truth, so why are you quoting her? Does she mention the fact that all three books present a God who demands to be worshipped, and that is why we build synagogues, churches and mosques, and why rabbis and priests and imams and what we call “worshippers” worship God, and a God who demands to be worshipped can hardly be called selfless?

99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID:[…] The extinct died leaving new living forms! We are debating the semantics of then or now. Yes, we are among the survivors who came from extinct ancestors. You accept evolution as a continuum. Then you create breaks in it. The old brings the now!! That is my position in using Raup's statistics.

You called my description of how evolution works “perfect”, and then disagreed with it! Once more: The extinct died, leaving 0.1% of survivors. Those survivors produced the new living forms of the next stage. The next extinction destroyed 99.9% of the then existing forms, and the 0.1% of survivors went on to create the next stage of new living forms. Raup’s statistics are based on plural extinctions, and the continuity is provided by the survivors of each stage. Example: 99.43% of dinosaurs left no descendants, but 0.57% survived and went on to produce thousands of species of birds. It is only the surviving 0.1% of the old that produce the new. I quote:

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 were you insane when you agreed?

The free-for-all theory

dhw: In your eyes, your perfect God’s use of evolution is imperfect, messy and inefficient, and despite his omnipotence he is incapable of inventing a system of life without mistakes which he tries in vain to correct, but he hopes that we will help him out. And for good measure, he also designed bugs that can outsmart him. Does all this make sense?

DAVID: Certainly does in a working system that allowed freedom as action as it must.

dhw: So it makes sense that an omnipotent, omniscient God is inefficient, unable to correct the mistakes in his design, relies on humans for help, and designs bugs that are cleverer than him. But yes indeed, the comings and goings of evolution, the so-called mistakes, and the victory of “bad” bugs over “good” bugs all make sense if your God deliberately gave all forms of life the autonomous means of designing their own methods of survival. That means a free-for-all.

DAVID: Yes, the dog-eat-dog interpretation implies a living free-for-all. There are no mistakes in God's design. You still don't understand: God made the only working system of life that can work. Please finally respond to that concept you've ignored.

You have told us repeatedly that there had to be mistakes in the design, which your God even tried to correct. I do not ignore your theory that your first-cause God was forced to design a system with mistakes. I simply regard it as incompatible with the theory that he is omnipotent, and so I propose instead that (if he exists) he created the system he wished to create. You agree that life’s history is “a living free-for-all”, in which case what you call “mistakes” are simply the result of organisms designing their own means of survival.