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

by dhw, Monday, October 14, 2024, 13:10 (4 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.

DAVID: We wonder if He wishes to be worshiped. We invent His wishes.

If that is the level of argument you want, then we may as well agree that all speculation about God is our invention, including his existence, and so there is no point in discussing any of the theories. I thought the subject of your possible God’s possible purposes, methods and nature were of interest to you, as they are for me. If so, our discussion can only be on the level of plausibility.

DAVID: […]. That He may have created us for no reason at all is as plausible as all the reasons we guess at. My position is God is more likely selfless than not.

IF he exists, I would regard it as utterly implausible that he would create a universe and all of life for no reason. And it is painfully clear that you do too. You have never deviated from your belief that your God is purposeful, and that his only purpose was to create us and our food. You have also “invented” what I see as plausible motives for creating life and us (including such human-like possibilities as enjoyment, interest, desire for recognition and worship), but you have also “invented” a characteristic (selflessness) which contradicts most of these other “inventions”. You also reject my own proposals because they too are based on “human-like” possibilities: love of creation, of new discoveries, of the unpredictable as opposed to the boredom of prescience. You have described your contradictions and double standards as “schizophrenic”, and one of you confirms your diagnosis by insisting that you do not contradict yourself..

God’s purpose and 99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: The 0.1% survivors are the progeny of the 99.9%. Stop slicing up the continuum of evolution.[…]

How can the 0.1% of survivors be the "progeny" of the 99.9% of species that have died? Example: do you think the four species of surviving avian dinosaurs were the children of the 696 dinosaur species that died out?

dhw: 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”.

DAVID: You conveniently forget biochemistry and fix on phenotype. Ediacaran biochemistry was used to make the Cambrian animals, in a continuum!

You conveniently forget that all life forms use the same biochemistry. When discussing evolution, we distinguish between species, and according to you, Cambrian species were created “de novo”. That is why you regard this "slice" of evolution as evidence for God’s existence!

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Of course.

So what are you arguing about?

The free-for-all theory

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

DAVID: A life without problems.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: God had to provide a working solution to create life. What we have is exactly what He chose.

That is my theistic proposal. Yours is that he had no choice, because you insist that despite your omnipotent God’s undisputed ability to design a world without problems (Eden), for some unknown reason this was the only one that would “work”, so he had no choice. Listen to yourself:

DAVID (last week): Of course he could design Eden if He wished.
DAVID: (this week) No He wasn't able! He gave us the only working system available, which He had to invent.

He could last week, but he couldn’t this week – and you never contradict yourself!

dhw: The obvious implication is that he WANTED the world as it is, not that he “has to stick” with something he doesn’t want!

DAVID: So your mean old God purposely gave us problems? Fits my idea that Eden is boring.

It certainly does. And how nice it is to see you acknowledging your own humanizing theory, though you’ll be denying it tomorrow. Your idea fits in with a free-for-all, which God would find far more interesting than a puppet show in which he pulls all the strings. But I don’t know why you call him “mean”. You have already got him endowing humans with free will, but I don’t recall you saying that was mean. A free-for-all puts the responsibility into the hands or paws or talons or cells of the organisms themselves.