New Miscellany: fine tuning, theodicy, evolution (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 23, 2025, 17:04 (11 days ago) @ dhw

Theodicy

DAVID: I have offered the faithful answers. You keep pounding the same old points. We have exhausted the subject for now.

dhw: You have offered answers that are either irrelevant or self-contradictory, and you have rejected my own possible answer.

DAVID: I don't see how your described God solves the problem of evil, which must be part of a free-for-all.

I’ll try again. The problem raised by theodicy is how and why an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God created evil. A possible answer is that he is NOT all-knowing but deliberately created a system which produced an unpredictable free-for-all for ALL life forms, not just for humans, as they ALL use their perhaps God-given intelligence to design their own means of survival. (If God doesn’t exist, then of course a free-for-all is the only possible explanation of evolution’s history.) The concept of good and evil is a human invention, based on what we think is good for us. A murderous bacterium does what is good for itself. God (deistic form) merely watches the history unfold – has enjoyed creating it, and is interested in all its variations (thus confirming your own view that he enjoys and is interested). We have no idea what he thinks or feels about it all. But he is not all-knowing, and he has not deliberately created evil. If you set aside your own preconceived notions of God (“I first choose a form of God I wish to believe in. The rest follows”), you will see that although of course this can never be more than an unproven theory, it solves the problems raised not only be theodicy but also by your own wacky, anthropocentric theory of evolution.

The bold is a correct view. It fits my point that evil is a side-effect of God's good works.

Evolution

DAVID: Raup in no way supports me. I don't know why God chose to evolve us.

dhw: So please stop quoting Raup, and please stop pretending that you know God’s sole purpose in creating and culling 99.9 irrelevant species was to produce us, and please don’t disown your own humanizing theories as to why your God might have wanted to create us in the first place.

DAVID: No pretense: a history of evolution delivers us, God's endpoint goal.

dhw: You do not “know” we were his one and only goal from the very beginning, or that he invented an inefficient way to produce us, and I asked you not to disown your own “humanizing” interpretations of his possible reasons for creating us.

Same answer: if God created evolution, and its endpoint is humans, of course humans were a goal.

The intelligent cell

DAVID: All organisms can adapt to minor new challenges.

dhw: Which simply means that they have limited intelligence. How do you know they are incapable of adapting to or exploiting major changes in whatever conditions may occur? You don’t. You simply repeat your belief in 3.8-billion-year old instructions or divine dabbling, though you subsume this theory under the bald statement that every response is “automatic”. See next exchange:

dhw: {...}since "developmental decision-making" occurs through interaction with such factors as the environment, it could hardly happen without some form of intelligent processing within the cell, the goal being its efficiency in enabling its survival and that of its community.

DAVID: All done with automatic responses.

dhw: According to what you wish to believe.>

Evolution: the role of Asgard Archaea

DAVID: it appears these are our direct ancestors as we must have came from bacteria which represent first life.

dhw: Right from the start we have single cells combining with other single cells in the biochemical fine-tuning without which life is impossible. For those of us who believe in evolution, all of them are our direct ancestors. But in the course of evolution they branched off into countless different lines, 99.9% of which proved to be dead ends. Only the 0.1% survived to become us and our food. It is worth noting that bacteria are still thriving, as they apply their intelligence to cope with every problem nature and humans can throw at them. You have never disagreed with this, and yet you think that for some reason, single cells lose their intelligence when they join forces to create a community.

Being part of an organism creates a totally different environment than as a single cell. Survival is a community problem.