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

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 08, 2024, 18:10 (9 days ago) @ dhw

Contradictions

DAVID: This is silly. You just described your God as having human desires. Mine doesn't.

dhw: When I asked you what you thought your purposeful God’s purposes might be for creating life, including humans, you offered enjoyment of creation and interest in his creations, and for humans perhaps to have a relationship with him, to recognize him and to worship him. This tied in with your agreement that he probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours. This does not make us gods or him human. You now wish to withdraw all your own perfectly reasonable guesses as well as my logical alternatives (which adopt some of those guesses), because they clash with your view that your God is “selfless”.

It was the rediscovery of Adler's 50/50 that set off my line of thought about God's selflessness. His only known purpose is to create humans. Could there be self-serving motives that I suggested as you note above? If we accept them as human wishes for a close relationship without knowing if God cares or not, they can be stated that way as reasonable statements. I am allowed to redevelop my thoughts about God as we discuss Him.

DAVID: One tract is not evidence of the overall impression Anderson gives.

dhw: The subject is not what Anderson says or doesn’t say. The subject is your insistence that your God is selfless, although you think his reason for creating us might have been his desire for recognition and worship.[…] . Now please tell us if the quote supports your belief in your God’s selflessness.

Fully explained above.

DAVID: No. Just one quote!

dhw: Haven’t you realized that Jews, Christians and Muslims build and go to synagogues, churches and mosques because they believe their God wants them to worship him? All three books are full of instructions to this effect. But you, who proudly stand alone in the world of theology, tell us God can’t possibly want to be worshipped because he is selfless.

Again, our wishes about a God relationship do not mean God needs them.

99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: […] Nothing is lost! Raup simply said to achieve today's surviving organisms (0.1%), 99.9% had to go extinct. An overall view you try to apply to each single branch.

dhw: You wrote: “His study was to explain why extinctions happened as a necessary part of evolution. He concluded ‘bad luck’. Well-adapted species suddenly were unprepared for new circumstances. The losses cumulatively were 99.9% with 0.1% as survivors.”

Plural extinctions, each one bringing new circumstances. The “cumulative” losses refer to all the extinctions (not “branches”), and nowhere does he say the 99.9% of all lost species PRODUCED the 0.1% of today’s survivors! How can extinct species produce anything??? Raup’s survivors produced the new species after each extinction. […]

DAVID: When did you read Raup? Overall the extinct produced the survivors.

dhw: I only know what you told us, as quoted above. Once more: Our extinct ancestors are part of the 99.9% of extinct species. But at each stage, after extinction, it was the 0.1% of survivors who produced the new species. You have agreed that we are descended from the 0.1% survivors, and not from the 99.9% which did not survive. Now please tell us Raup’s theory as to how dead organisms can produce new species.

Of course they don't! Either they were a dead end OR they produced their new species progeny as they went extinct.

The free-for-all theory

dhw: Listen to yourself: “God had to handle mistakes in evolutionary events, not in the biochemical system of life!!!” “The biochemistry of life has free floating proteins in action, free to make mistakes.” No contradiction? “Of course he wished it [the system].” “God…does not have wishes.” […]

DAVID: Still missing the point: He picked the only system that COULD work!

dhw: As usual, you ignore your contradictions, and pretend that I have ignored a theory already dealt with repeatedly. You don’t know that it is the only system that could work. You don’t know that a first-cause, omnipotent, omniscient creator of all things was incapable of creating a Garden of Eden and was forced by circumstances of his own making to design a system which was largely out of his control (evil bugs and cells and disasters and humans). I think it more likely that a first-cause, omnipotent, omniscient God would create the system he wanted to create. A free-for-all, elements of which even you acknowledge, would at a stroke remove the need for you to ridicule his inefficiency and his inability to deal with so-called “mistakes”, which only humans can correct, despite his omnipotence and omniscience!

The living system we have is the only one we know. A God, by definition omniscient, will pick the only possible working system. Why should He deliberately give us a system that raised all the issues we discuss in the theodicy threads? You just raised up your humanized guy who likes to be entertained.