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

by dhw, Tuesday, October 15, 2024, 11:40 (3 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] our discussion can only be on the level of plausibility.

DAVID: We are at a level of plausibility. Your responses to me have treated my theoretical thoughts about God as if they are real fact. Stop it.

How could I possibly treat your theories as fact? I have been testing them for plausibility, and they keep failing the test because you keep contradicting yourself.

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.
And:
DAVID: 'His only purpose' clearly does not include any self purpose, and therefore, selflessness is a reasonable conclusion and 'plausible motives' are only possible conjectures.

I find it totally implausible that your always purposeful God should create life and us “for no reason at all”. His existence and ‘only purpose’ are ‘possible, plausible conjectures’, but when you reject your own plausible conjectures concerning enjoyment, interest, recognition and worship because they clash with another conjecture (selflessness), and you reject my equally plausible conjectures (enjoyment, interest, love of new discoveries etc.) for the same reason, I see no plausibility in your schizophrenic self-contradictions.

DAVID: My schizophrenia is based on a continuing free-floating analysis. You have skimmed over the humanizing aspects of your God's expressed desires.

I've done no such thing. I’ve listed your plausible “human” desires along with mine, and none of them make your God a human being. Your rigid anthropocentrism, like your suddenly rigid conjecture of “selflessness”, is the opposite of “free-floating” analysis, and it too leads to a mass of contradictions which you try to gloss over.

God’s purpose and 99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: Thank you for agreeing the biochemistry is in a continuum. Only de novo at phenotypical level.

“Only” is the understatement of the year. The whole point of evolution is that the process produces new species. The fact that they all have the same biochemistry does not alter the fact that 99.9% of those species become extinct, and the surviving 0.1% go on to produce the new species until the next major stage repeats the process. Your belief that 99.9% of the dead species are the mummies and daddies of each surviving 0.1% is so absurd that I am embarrassed for your sake that it remains on this website. Equally embarrassing is your disagreement with your agreement that we plus food are NOT descended from the 99.9% but "from the 0.1% surviving".

The free-for-all theory

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

dhw: 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.

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

DAVID: Eden is Biblical theory, not reality as I've said before. Life is reality. There is no 'unknown reason' because no one can imagine another working system with the complexity of this one. Where is the contradiction? Only when you fuse two disparate realms.

More obfuscation. You agreed that Eden symbolizes a life without problems and “of course He could design it if He wished”. So your all-powerful God couldn’t design a system without problems, although he could. You refuse to accept the possibility that an all-powerful, all-knowing, first-cause God might have created the world as it is because that is the world he wished to create – and not because of some rule that forced him against his benevolent (your word) will to create all the different evils that underlie the problem of theodicy.

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

dhw: It certainly does. And how nice it is to see you acknowledging your own humanizing theory, though you’ll be denying it tomorrow.

Prophecy fulfilled above.

Your idea fits in with a free-for-all, which God would find far more interesting than a puppet show […] . 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.

DAVID: Organisms are responsible only for personal survival.

And the struggle for survival is what underlies the whole magnificent spectacle of the ever-changing world that results from a free-for-all.

DAVID: You again imply God needs a interesting free-for-all which I've referred to as needing entertainment.

You try to trivialize this plausible conjecture with your derogatory vocabulary. The desire to create something enjoyable and interesting seems to me to be a plausible motive for God, just as it is for us. But that does not make God “needy”, and it doesn’t “humanize” him. It is God passing his predilections on to us.