Back to theodicy and David's theories (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by David Turell , Saturday, April 24, 2021, 16:36 (1099 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Evolution with a giant bush of food energy for an eventual huge human population is fully logical when viewed by a logical mind keeping God's role in mind.

dhw: How can the past “giant bush of food energy” be “for” an eventual huge human population? In your own words, for the umpteenth time: “The current bush of food is NOW for humans NOW. There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms.” And “Extinct life has no role in current time.” Please stop pretending that your Alice in Wonderland nonsense about past food bushes being “for” present humans is God’s logic.

My quotes above are fully logical. You are muddled about evolution as a continuous process from one level of complexity to the next, constantly building on innovations from the past. The above bold is your nonsense twist of my opinion.

DAVID: It is symbolic of my knowing as I present those personal thoughts of mine about God, they allegorically imply His possible human comparisons, since He is not human and a person like no other person.

dhw: So do you allegorically and symbolically believe that in his own non-human way he had only one purpose, was always in control etc. etc., or don’t you?

I am the same. God's purpose was to produce us, and was in control to achieve that goal.

This thread then digressed to our personal backgrounds, which may or may not be of interest to anyone who reads our posts.

DAVID: I never really rebelled. I passively accepted a "Jewish father" role to raise my kids with a Jewish wife as reformed Jews. I never liked Jewish liturgy as overfly repetitive of Biblical thought, without really answering any real questions. When I finally dug into it, the intricacies of living biochemistry appearing for no good natural reason, and opposite to you, no help from Darwin theory to provide some logic about evolutionary design, I realized God had to exist. Darwin didn't have to prove to me we evolved. That is obvious. Since the steps in evolution are so complex and obviously require design, it was an easy step. The explanation is satisfying as it makes sense.

dhw: We were both born into a world in which evolution was increasingly being accepted as a fact. In Darwin’s day (and in some circles even today), that was far from being the case, one reason being precisely that it contradicted the biblical version of direct creation of species. Your version of evolution in fact constitutes an uneasy attempt to combine the two versions, since you insist on direct creation, but propose that your version of God either preprogrammed or dabbled every new species to emerge from previous species. It’s Genesis plus common descent. My own motive for reading Origin in the first place was that I thought it would provide confirmation of my early teenage atheism. Only when I read it did I realize that it did no such thing (shame upon atheists who misuse it for their own ends – and shame upon theists who do the same). Like you, I came to see the astonishing complexity of life, and was amazed to note that in this book Darwin explicitly avoided the question of its origin, and indeed in my edition of it, he actually attributed life itself to the Creator. I never quite understood this until George Jelliss wrote in to inform me that these references to God were added later. (Some authors suggest that this was an attempt to avoid offending his Christian wife.) But long, long ago I had discovered that Darwin regarded himself as an agnostic. Certainly Origin was the key to my rejection of atheism, although I also found it impossible to believe in a God. I guess “theodicy” may have played a role in this too.

The major background difference in us is first my drifting along until my 50's, as I accepted God without question before medical school and afterward accepted evolution as replacing Him. As I looked into Darwin I found he had nothing but common descent to offer. The second is my biochemical training which made me finally recognize life was/is designed by a magnificent mind. Theodicy is our human criticism of what seems wrong, and as proven over and over may be right. I've offered many examples.