New Miscellany: theodicy, climate change, evolution (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 05, 2025, 13:37 (19 hours, 46 minutes ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy

DAVID: I am not a trained theologian. I might remind you, theologians ae experts in the belief in God. I have simply parroted their views on theodicy.

dhw: Nobody is an expert on the nature of God, and I wish you would respond to the arguments instead of parroting a view which makes no sense. Evil exists. How can it be squared with the concept of an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God who created everything that exists? Certainly not by pretending that evil will disappear if you only think of the good. Please explain why you disagree with my objection.

DAVID: You magnify a small problem, the side effects of God's 'good' works, without which we would not exist. It is still proportionality. Or God knew what He was doing and accepted the consequences as necessary to achieve His goals.

If you believe in a God, I’d have thought it would be a pretty large problem if that God didn’t care about the evil he inflicted on you and the rest of us. That’s why theologians look for answers to the problem of theodicy. After suggesting that the proportion of good removes the problem, you now suggest that despite his omnipotence, he was incapable of achieving his goals without inflicting all the suffering. (You have even had him trying but failing to alleviate the suffering). So much for omnipotence! And what were his “goals”? According to you, his only goal was to create us and our food. And what might have been his goal for creating us? According to you, he might have wanted a relationship with us, recognition, worship. So we have a God who inadvertently creates evil because that’s the only way he can be sure we will recognize and worship him of our own accord. But theodicy is not a problem so long as you stick your head in the sand.

Climate change

Timing a probable glacial period

DAVID: The Earth and its humans can tolerate a degree or two of more warmth, which may then plateau. Our defense again clearly destructive glaciation is heat!!!

dhw: Humans are creating extra degrees of warmth through their use of fossil fuels, deforestation, and their methods of transport and agriculture. You keep agreeing […] that these need to change! Your only objection is to a panic-stricken rush that would create social and economic disaster. Now you’re pretending that we can carry on using the same methods and miraculously their effects may plateau! May I suggest to you that we find alternatives as quickly but also as pragmatically as possible to avoid the inevitable escalation of environmental damage that is already all too obvious, and over the next few thousand years, future generations may also find alternatives to ward off the heat of glaciation? Stop panicking.

DAVID: What doss the bold mean? There are existing theories that CO2 will flatten. Only a few degrees of heat can stop the glaciers from appearing.

How can existing degrees of CO2 “flatten” if we continue to use the fossil fuels, deforestation, and methods of transportation and agriculture that are causing degrees of CO2 to increase? You have agreed that we should find alternatives! Over the next few thousand years, we shall need to find practices that will ward off glaciation. How does that change the current need to prevent escalation of current dangers?

Evolution: dinosaurs to birds

dhw: [...] you like to emphasize the gaps as evidence that your God steps in to create species “de novo”.

DAVID: It is the only explanation we have, sadly for Darwinists.

dhw: Luckily for Darwinists “we have a good chain of fossils to explain the course of evolution” (D. Turell...). New fossils are being discovered all the time, but it’s not surprising that there will be breaks in the chain over 150,000,000 years of life, let alone 3,800,000,000 years.

DAVID: Archeology is all/only an interpretation of bones.

You mean palaeontology.

DAVID: We jump from Erectus and/or heidelbergensis, etc. and make assumptions based on common similarities. Sapiens exact origin is totally unknown. I doubt we will ever know.

I will quote you on the Savannah thread. Meanwhile, every new fossil helps to fill gaps in the chain of evolution, confirming Darwin’s theory of evolution through common descent.