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

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 24, 2024, 16:06 (10 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I will agree faith is not rational.

dhw: Thank you. I will make a note of this for the next time you claim that your theories about evolution and God’s purpose, method and nature are based on reason.

DAVID (moved from “More Miscellany”): Stop complaining that I made logical choices in thought that lead to faith.

dhw: You have just agreed that your faith in your choices (apart from the design theory) is irrational (i.e. not logical).

The thoughts are logical. The final leap is not.

dhw: How do you know [God] is all-good by your own standards of goodness?

DAVID: I take all-goodness as by definition.

dhw: Since nobody knows God, how can anyone possibly define his attributes with any authority? […] would you regard your God’s desire to relieve his and our boredom as “all-good” moral justification for the millions of people who have died or suffered from the evil he allowed to happen (human evil) or caused to happen (he is to blame for the natural evils)?

Please give us a direct answer.

You have conflated a mess of things. The theodicy answer is always proportionality.
My direct answer is would you prefer not to be alive?

DAVID: Ancient Hebrew philosophy of Dayenu, it is enough, is the theodistic answer. […] It means I am satisfied with what God has given us. Not your Scrooge view!

dhw: There is no problem concerning your satisfaction with life and the world as they are. The problems arise when you insist on theories concerning his purpose, method and nature that are full of illogicalities and contradictions.

DAVID: It is you assumption our guesses about God's personal wishes are REAL!! WE do not know what God really wants, if anything! You invent these conflicts.

dhw: It is my assumption that since nobody knows whether God exists, let alone what he is like, the best we can do is make guesses based on what we know about life and its history. But it is also my assumption that whatever guesses a person makes will make sense to that person. Does it make sense to you that your God wants us to worship him but has no self-interest? That he has only one purpose (us plus food), but proceeds to design 99.9 out of 100 species that have no connection with us plus food? That he is all good, but is to be blamed for designing bugs which he knows will kill 50 million people in a year?

Same old baseless distortion of evolution.

Under "Giant viruses"

DAVID: It is your cockamamy view of evolution that is at fault. All species produced were relevant in their time.

dhw: Relevant to what? Certainly not to what you believe to have been your God’s one and only purpose (us and our food), since only 0.1% of them led to us and our food.

DAVID: Relevant to current ecosystem of the time in evolution. More distortion of Raup. Cleared up in the other thread, remember.

dhw: Your distortion of Raup, whose findings if anything contradict your own conclusions, has indeed been cleared up on the Plantinga (now Raup) thread. Otherwise, I like your response. Every species is relevant to the ecosystem of its time. And 99.9% of them were irrelevant to the ecosystems of our time, and you have no idea why your God created them and then culled them, since we and our food are supposed to have been his one and only purpose and are descended from only 0.1% of them.

DAVID: More cockamamy wondering. Evolution requires culling, Doesn't it?

See the other thread for your absurd distortions of Raup.

DAVID: Another view of the statistics of our evolution:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGxStpNnPZttJdhRHJjjvBQXvKg

QUOTE: "Longtermism says that your altruism should focus on benefitting the longterm development of humanity because, if all goes well, many more humans will live in the future than now. In this illustration, each grain of sand illustrates 10 million people. The green grains are those alive today, that’s about 8 billion, the red ones are those who lived in the past, about 110 billion. But that is just a tiny part of all the lives that are yet to come."

DAVID: a meaningful excerpt close to Raup's numbers, in this case about 0.7% survivors. Just another normal view of evolution and its statistics. Were those 110 billion lost humans a waste of God's time as seen in dhw's looney view of evolution???

dhw: This is getting painful. According to you, your God’s one and only goal was to produce us humans plus food. Your wacky theory is not that his only goal was to produce David Turell and his contemporaries and therefore all our human ancestors were a waste of time! It’s the 99.9 out of 100 non-human, non-contemporary species that were – according to your wacky theory – a waste of his time.

A reasonable God had His reasons to evolve us rather than direct creation.