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

by dhw, Sunday, October 13, 2024, 08:48 (5 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: That reasonable explanation contains the wish! We don't know if God cares! In this two-way relationship we only KNOW one side.

Stop dodging. If I ask you why you think your God creates us, and you reply that you think he might want us to worship him, that has nothing to do with whether he cares about us or not. Wanting to be worshipped concerns HIS motives, not our wishes. You think he might want to be worshipped, but you think he is selfless, which means you think he doesn’t want to be worshipped.

God’s purpose and 99.9% v 0.1%

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Not agreed. Not dead ends. The 0.1% survivors are the progeny of the 99.9%. Stop slicing up the continuum of evolution.

So if all current species were wiped out and only bacteria survived, you would say that humans, elephants and ants fathered the bacteria, would you? Evolution has taken place in a series of “slices”, a prime example of which is the Cambrian Explosion. Your whole, loudly trumpeted point, is that it was NOT a continuum, and only your God could have created all those species “de novo”. We have other explosions and we have Raup’s extinctions, each of which marks the disappearance of the old and the appearance of the new. The continuum is provided by the 0.1% of the old which survive to create the new.

The free-for-all theory

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!!!

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

DAVID: A life without problems.

You believe that your God could have created a world in which there were no problems. That means no mistakes, no evils etc. But instead you have him being forced to create a world with problems.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: The answer is obvious! The system we have has major problems! It is the system God gave us.

Yes, if he exists. So why didn't he give us a world without problems, which he was perfectly capable of doing?

DAVID: We theoretically should have gotten a perfect system but have this instead.

Not “should”, but “could”.

DAVID: Thus God is perfect with all powers OR creating life requires a system that works with warts and God knows He has to stick with this system because IT WORKS like none other. Picked despite His powers.

Your alternatives are skew-whiff! You think he is perfect with all powers and could have created a world without problems. Instead, he chose to create a world with problems. You keep telling us he had no choice. A first-cause omnipotent creator of all things would not be forced to create problems he doesn’t want to make, if he is perfectly capable of creating a world without problems. The obvious implication is that he WANTED the world as it is, not that he “has to stick” with something he doesn’t want!