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

by dhw, Monday, April 29, 2024, 09:03 (16 days ago) @ David Turell

Theodicy and boredom

dhw: And so according to you, he allowed/created evil in order to relieve boredom. For himself and for us.

DAVID: No!!! I can't imagine God wanting puppets. He gave us free will instead. Stop distortions! My God does not get bored. No Garden of Eden, but a challenging life makes more sense.

dhw: He would not want puppets because he would find them boring. “Exactly,” you said. And so he gave us free will, knowing that we would use it to rape, murder, slaughter etc. As we have agreed, it is perfectly possible to lead an interesting. “challenging” life without evil. So why would an all-good God want to create the bugs for which you blame him, or to allow human evil?

DAVID: We have free will. We cause evil. God does not 'allow' evil in your sense. As for bugs, without them life would not exist.

If he knew it would happen but he made no attempt to stop it, then he allowed it to happen. (You liked Plantinga’s statement that God had a “morally sufficient reason to allow evil…”) I’m not denying that there are good bugs that are essential for life. It is you who have blamed your God for designing bad bugs as an example of the natural evils he created.

dhw: […]And this is the God you tell us is selfless and without self-interest.

DAVID: God has no self-interest and does not have a personality trait of boredom. Stop humanizing Him. When will you ever learn how to really think out Him?

dhw: When will you ever learn to stop contradicting yourself? Earlier you wrote: ”There are no established standards for who God is.” How then can you possibly announce that he has no self-interest or boredom, when you’ve just proposed, championed and claimed moral justification for the theory that your God allowed/created evil to alleviate boredom.

DAVID: When will you learn to follow precepts??? I said no standards for God. So, I can make my own! Theological thought is not a democracy where the majority wins!

Of course you are free to make your own, and to contradict yourself, and concoct theories which not even you can understand. But if you tell us he is all-good though you blame him for creating bad bugs, he wants to be worshipped and recognized but has no self-interest, he wants to prevent boredom for himself and for us but he never gets bored, I’m afraid it’s rather difficult to follow your precepts.

Under "Giant viruses"

DAVID: […] All species produced were relevant in their time.

dhw: Relevant to what? […]

DAVID: Relevant to current ecosystems of the time in evolution.

dhw: [..] Thank you for confirming their irrelevance to the present, which is the reason why your theory of evolution is so illogical.

DAVID: All extinction led to current new living forms.

dhw: But the 0.1% are the lines of organisms that led to us and our food. Read what you wrote:

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

DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

dhw: If we plus food are not descended from the 99.9%, how can they have led to us plus food? We used the dinosaurs as our obvious example: only birds descended from them. The rest were dead ends.

DAVID: That is your total math mess!! The 0.1% current survivors are the direct result of their 99.9% ancestors. You can't have one without the other.

Of course the current survivors are the direct result of their ancestors, and 99.9% of their ancestors are dead. But the ancestors themselves were part of the 0.1% of species that formed the lines leading to the current survivors. The rest – as you have repeatedly confirmed – DID NOT LEAD to us and our food. Dinosaurs were our clear example. Please stop fiddling with the maths which you have explicitly accepted above.

Transferred from “More Miscellany”

dhw: Please tell us which part of the [..] theory is a distortion. To be precise: do you now reject your beliefs that (1) we and our food were your God’s sole purpose, 2) that he chose to design and cull 99.9% of past species, 3) that we and our food are descended from only 0.1% of past species, which means the remaining 99.9% were irrelevant to his purpose?.

DAVID: Constantly answered in the past: 1) we and our Earth's resources were God's purpose. We are a most unexpected, unusual result of a natural evolution.

You have confirmed my 1).

2) Culling is what evolution does!!!

If your God controlled evolution, then your God did the designing and the culling, as you have told us over and over again.

3) What is here living on Earth, the final 0.1% is for our use. They came from the 99.9% their ancestors. Evolution is not 'these' 99.9% and 'those' 0.1% surviving. Stop splitting them apart. Evolution is one whole process.

See above for your distortion of the maths and your confirmation that we and our food are NOT descended from 99.9% of past species. Of course we can split evolution apart into all its different branches, periods, extinctions, speciations. Neither you nor your food are descended from the brontosaurus. Multiply that example by countless millions.