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

by dhw, Monday, April 15, 2024, 09:09 (14 days ago) @ David Turell

Plantinga

DAVID: The free-will challenge is simple: we humans must keep to strict morality. When we fail evil appears.

dhw: All societies have rules designed to protect them. You have referred to Moses’ code. Nobody knows God’s code. But if God’s code is the same as ours, you still can’t explain why he allowed murder, rape and the holocaust in the first place.

DAVID: You can't get over the fact humans are free to murder, rape, etc. God found it morally sufficient to give us free will. With it the Garden of Eden disappeared. It should have.

Of course we’re free. And if God exists, of course he allowed us to murder, rape etc. The question is why. You agree that if he had a morally sufficient reason, it would be justified. You reject Plantinga’s monstrously self-centred reason, and now (see below), the reason is that it was to relieve boredom.

DAVID: Are you suggesting God should have kept us as puppets?

dhw: No. If God exists, I have even suggested that one explanation for the 99.9% of “irrelevant” species was that he created life as one vast free-for-all, right through from speciation to human machinations. This would also give you a logical explanation for human evil, which would have its roots in the egocentric battle for survival.

DAVID: Survival can occur without evil.

Of course it can. Just as enjoyment of life can occur without evil (see below). But in the free-for-all, it doesn’t. You missed out my reference to carnivorousness as a forerunner: killing for personal gain.

DAVID: Human choices cause evil. Evil is our fault, God not involved.

You have said that your God wanted to relieve the boredom of a Garden of Eden, and that morally justifies his knowingly allowing murder, rape, the holocaust etc., and for good measure he is also to be blamed for creating bugs that kill millions of us.

dhw: And I’m sure you’ll agree that your God, who you believe is interested in his creations, would find puppets pretty boring.

DAVID: Exactly!

You have just confirmed that the God you call selfless wanted to relieve his own boredom. (NB I have no objection whatsoever to this theory. You are the one who has always opposed it until now.)

DAVID: [..] I can't know God's reason for His creative results, but producing us is His obvious intention with all the manifestations.

dhw: Producing the vast variety of species unconnected with us would also have been his obvious intention with all the different manifestations. Why do you keep forgetting the 3.X billion years of history which you have dismissed as your God’s messy, cumbersome and inefficient way of designing us plus food?

DAVID: God can take whatever amount of time He needed. We know His system was not direct.

Assuming he exists, we do not know that we plus food were his one and only goal, or that he deliberately designed every individual species. The fact that we only appeared after 3.X billion years’ worth of species that had no connection with us would seem to suggest that being all-powerful and all-knowing (according to you), he must have had a different purpose for designing the 99.9 irrelevant species, or that he did not design them. How about relief from boredom as a motive for the ever-changing variety?

DAVID: That God did not want a boring Garden of Eden for us, is a reasonable guess. Yes, we are debating free-will as a major source of evil.

So he wanted evil to prevent us and himself from getting bored.

dhw: Either way, being omniscient, he knew that murder, rape and the holocaust would be the result, but he allowed it in order to prevent boredom, […] why do you think boredom can only be avoided if millions of people suffer the effects of the evil that your God has created or allowed? (See also under "Giant viruses" on "More Miscellany".)

DAVID: Your usual tortured reasoning. Humans do many things that entertain, yet not be evil!!!

That is what I have just pointed out!!! 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.

Double standards

DAVID: 1) Choice is not an issue of double standards. 2) Being proud of seeing both sides as equals simply is not being willing to make choices. 3) Almost nothing presented is truly 50/50.

I’ve omitted the rest of the post, since you haven’t taken any notice of it, and I’ve numbered your comments. Once more: 1) is correct. 2) Nothing to do with pride, and not willing to make a choice has nothing to do with double standards. 3) Nobody knows the “truth”. Of course a fixed belief in one option is not a 50/50. None of this has anything to do with double standards, a term which denotes the use of one standard to reject an opinion, and the defence of an opinion although it also violates the same standard. For example, you rejected deism because it was not mainstream theology, but you embrace panentheism although it is not mainstream theology.