New Miscellany 1: theodicy, evolution, cellular intelligence (General)

by dhw, Monday, March 24, 2025, 09:25 (11 days ago) @ David Turell

The range of subjects is expanding, though many are interlinked. I’ll try to list them.

Theodicy

dhw: 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. (David’s bold)

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

You have totally ignored the whole context of this theory! So-called good and so-called evil are not side effects but evaluations created by us humans solely according to our own interests! They are the direct results of a free-for-all – and a free-for-all is the very opposite of your view of your all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God, who started out with the sole purpose of creating us and our food, deliberately created all the “good” but was powerless to prevent the bad, or alternatively, we should ignore the bad because he deliberately created so much good, and that makes you happy.

David’s theory of 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.

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

Same old "iffy" obfuscations. 1) We do not know that the “endpoint” is humans; 2) if God created a free-for-all, there is no reason to assume that he deliberately created humans; 3) even if he did, you have subtly changed one and only goal to “a” goal; 4) if he created every species, extant and extinct, and 99.9% of them were irrelevant to humans, then he must have had a different goal in creating them – although you dismiss this possibility, because you prefer to view him as a messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer.

Bacteria and the intelligent cell

DAVID: […] we must have come 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.

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

Do you really believe that single-celled bacteria don’t have to find ways to survive, and when they form a biofilm in order to enhance their chances of survival, they suddenly lose their intelligence? You’ve turned it all upside down: It is the environment that creates the need for cells to form communities.