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

by dhw, Saturday, October 12, 2024, 13:03 (6 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: All of your listed proposals of mine are conjectures about God posed before I considered selflessness. They are human wishes for relationship, which obviously may not apply to God.
And:
DAVID: We do not know how or if God accepts these human wishes.

dhw: Once more, they are NOT human wishes: your theory that God enjoys creating and is interested in his creations offers us a purpose for his creation of life, and his wish for recognition and worship is HIS wish, not ours, offering a specific reason for his designing humans.

DAVID: THEY are human wishes because they are proposed by humans regarding possible God wishes!

Your efforts to twist meanings are becoming farcical. Here is the most obvious example: I asked you why you thought your God might have wanted to create humans. One (very reasonable) answer: because he might want us to recognize and worship him. This is your explanation, not your wish. Why would you wish that he would want us to worship him??? But it contradicts your belief (wish?) that God is selfless.

dhw: You say you have “rejected nothing”, but you reject all these “conjectures” concerning your God’s possible purposes, because your new theory is that he is selfless, which means he cannot want to enjoy creating, to be recognized, or to be worshipped. But you never contradict yourself!

DAVID: You don't understand the difference: a selfless God creates without any expectations for Himself. Bolded above are my human proposals for a relationship with God. His response is Adler 50/50.

Stop flannelling. I know what selfless means, and the desire to be worshipped cannot be selfless. You are deliberately trying not to understand the implications of your answer to my question why he created us. 50/50 relates to whether God cares about us, and that does involve our wishes.

God’s purpose and 99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: His only known purpose is to create humans.

dhw:...Even you can’t explain why, if his only purpose was to create us (plus food), he didn’t do so directly. In brief, if God exists, we can only assume that he had a purpose (unknown to us) for creating all life, including humans.

DAVID: The issue is how evolution processed the 'now'. Humans are using everything living on Earth in some way now coming from previous ancestors.

dhw: You have a remarkable gift for obfuscation. For those of us who believe in evolution, of course everything on earth now came from previous ancestors, That is vastly different from your absurd theory that every species that has ever existed on earth was an ancestor to humans and our contemporary life forms. See your disagreement with yourself:

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.

DAVID: We obviously look at evolution differently. Let's agree 99.9% extinctions preceded/produced 0.1% survival. And WE come from the survivors.

Let’s agree that plural extinctions resulted in approx. 99.9% of species coming to a dead end. Each 0.1% of survivors produced each subsequent stage of evolution right up to our own stage, which has evolved from the previous 0.1% of survivors.

The free-for-all theory

DAVID: The NUANCE you miss is we live in the only system that could work. His omniscience would lead Him to the only one that works with its attendant warts. That is WHY the warts exist.

dhw: It is not a “NUANCE” – it is your theory, and it contradicts his omnipotence.

*** a relevant quote for you:

DAVID: That God did not want a boring Garden of Eden for us, is a reasonable guess.

dhw: He did not want it. Not he couldn't design it.

DAVID: […] Of course, He could design Eden if He wished.

dhw: Thank you. That means he was not forced to create a system with warts, but he wished to do so. Case closed.

DAVID: Not closed, Eden is biblical theory, not at a worldly practical level. In reality God used the only system that could work, based on His omniscience. He would know all possibilities.

dhw: I’ve used “Eden” as shorthand for a perfect world without mistakes and without evil. So your comment above means: Of course, he could design a perfect world without mistakes and evil IF HE WISHED.

DAVID: I did not use Eden as you did!!!

What did you mean by a “boring Garden of Eden”?

dhw: It is you who insist that despite his omniscience and omnipotence he did not have the knowledge or power to do it.

DAVID: A working system means it must work. God invented what works. Ours does. An omniscient God would know the limits!

An omnipotent God would have no limits. An omnipotent God would create what he wants to create. How do you know that this was not the system he WANTED, as opposed to being a system demanding evils that he didn’t want?