Return to David's theory of theodicy;Plantinga & Held (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, April 21, 2024, 22:05 (12 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Sunday, April 21, 2024, 22:12

Welcome back. I hope you’ve fully recovered now!

DAVID (April 16): All Raup said was 0.1% are the living result.

dhw: The fact that the current 0.1% are amazing has nothing whatsoever to do with your wacky theory, and you have agreed explicitly that they are not descended from the 99.9% of extinct species, as follows:

dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from the 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived.?

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

dhw: If we and our food are NOT descended from the 99.9%, then the 99.9% were irrelevant to your God’s one and only purpose, which was to produce us and our food. Please stop contradicting yourself, and please stop moaning that I am distorting Raup, who you have agreed provides absolutely no support for your wacky theory.

You know nothing of Raup except through me and you have distorted what I have told you
Raup said. His study was to explain why extinctions happened as a necessary part of evolution. He concluded 'bad luck'. Well-adapted species suddenly were unprepared for new circumstances. The loses cumulatively were 99.9% with 0.1% as survivors. Our large human population and all of the bush of life available for our use are the survivors. You try to throw away the 99.9% as an unnecessary component. But that is how evolution works leaving much behind to reach the present. Eviscerating evolution is your weird conclusion with the 99.9% counting for nothing. And you call me wacky!

dghw: I pointed out that carnivorousness was a forerunner of killing for personal gain.

DAVID: It has to be dog-eat-dog. Life requires a constant input of energy.

dhw: Herbivores do not eat kill and eat their fellow animals.

DAVID: OK, so they destroy plants.

dhw: Do you regard growing and eating potatoes and beans as being on a par with killing and eating a fellow animal? NB I’m not campaigning for vegetarianism. I’m merely pointing out that carnivorousness is a pre-human process which in principle anticipates many human evils, as these generally arise from the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others.

Eating meat does not create evil. It is a natural requirement.

Theodicy and relief from boredom

dhw: You can avoid boredom without millions of people suffering from evil. You have now informed us that your God allowed murder, rape and the Holocaust because he and we would have been bored without them. (He would have found puppets boring.) Your new version of God is just as egocentric as Plantinga’s, and you have once more contradicted yourself, because here you agree that we do not need evil in order to relieve possible boredom.

DAVID: Our necessary free will means we cannot avoid evil happening. A human cause of evil, not God's fault.

dhw: You have agreed that humans do many things that entertain but are not boring. It is therefore perfectly possible to lead an interesting life without the rapes, murders, holocausts, bugs and natural disasters which your God apparently allowed/created in order to alleviate his and our boredom.

Stop blaming God for human created evil.

DAVID: Same confused view. We need bad bugs in good places (gut biome). There are necessary tradeoffs.

dhw: Irrelevant to your new theory, which is that your God wanted evil because without it, life would have been boring. This contradicts your belief that God is selfless, and it supports one of my proposals: that his purpose for creating life might have been to enjoy creating things that would be interesting. But you dismissed that possibility because it “humanized” God in a way you disapproved of.

DAVID: So, a humanized God is OK with you?

dhw: It is you who proposed that God would have found an Eden full of puppets boring. That is no less “humanized” than my proposing that God might have created life because he wanted to create something he would find interesting.

Back to you humanized self-serving God who must entertain Himself.

Double standards

DAVID: Once again you illogically attack my choices. Of course, choice involves rejections. You simply want to float neutrally above all.

dhw: You are determined to ignore the meaning of the term “double standards”. The attack is not on your choices or rejections, but on your application of a particular standard (you reject deism because it is not mainstream), while you defend your panentheism although it is not mainstream either. Non-mainstream is bad if it’s someone else’s opinion, but it’s OK if it’s your opinion.

DAVID: Your self-serving use of double standards is simply telling me not to make valid choices between two positions. It protects your 'no-choice' agnosticism as mental neutralism.

dhw: No it isn’t, and no it doesn’t. The above example (non-mainstream is bad, except if it’s YOUR non-mainstream) is YOUR self-serving use of double standards. I can’t believe that you haven’t understood the explanation.

Different theistic positions have reasoned theism. I have the right to pick and choose intellectually while you choose not to make choices and remain happily neutral at drift. I have the intellectual right to choose my mainstream!!! Be happy in your noncommittal neutrality!!!