More Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Friday, May 03, 2024, 08:27 (17 days ago) @ David Turell

Enjoyment, boredom and theodicy.

DAVID: God may enjoy creating is a possible attribute since He does create. But 'enjoy' MUST be used allegorically, since God is not human and may not want or need the emotions we have.
And:
DAVID: Boredom is a human problem. It may not affect God at all. Don't apply boredom to Him.

I have dealt with your absurd use of “allegory” on the other thread. “May not want” is simply balanced by “may want”. Nobody knows the truth!

dhw: […] I don’t find it difficult to believe that the conscious being you call God might find eternity boring if he didn’t have anything other than himself to think about.

DAVID: The bold is a prime example of how you view God, as PRIMARILY HUMAN!

Where do you get “primarily” from? You said yourself that he would have found puppets boring. You think he wants us to worship him, is an inefficient designer, but enjoys creating and is interested in his creations. This does not make an eternal, immaterial, sourceless creator of universes and life “primarily” human!

Theodicy

DAVID: I initially raised here the issue of theodicy for completeness.

dhw: So please tell us why you blame him for the murderous bugs.

DAVID: they exist form a morally sufficient reason: they help create the life we enjoy.

That would be a reason for not blaming him, but you wrote that you do blame him. Why?

"Humanization"

dhw: A deliberately designed free-for-all, not just for bad bugs and human free will but for the whole of evolution, would also make sense, as an explanation for the enormous variety of life forms that have come and gone.

DAVID: Backwards as usual. God makes the world as it is. It doesn't run independently as a show for Him. No contradictions here for your humanized form of a God.

dhw: Your usual statement of opinion as fact, and a blanket rejection of any humanizing “maybes” other than your own.

DAVID: I attempt no humanizations of God.

This is your usual attempt to blank out statements you have made in the past. Enjoyment and interest, desire to be recognized and worshipped, inefficiency, powerlessness (can’t control the bugs), possibly/probably/certainly has thought patterns and emotions like ours...Why are you so afraid of your own “maybes”? Don’t you find it perfectly feasible that the creator should imbue his creations with some of his own attributes? Is it not possible that your God’s purpose in designing us was to create a being that would recognize him, commune with him, worship him, love him, be loved by him? Why do you solidly oppose the very explanations that you yourself have proposed in the past?

Aquatic spiders

DAVID: Just-so stories, as in the article, add nothing of substance.

dhw: Why do you find it unreasonable to suggest that organisms might move elsewhere if they can’t find food or they are in danger?

DAVID: Obviously, you enjoy just-so stories. You just spouted a truism

A truism is something that is so obviously true that it doesn’t need to be said. So why do you call an obvious truth a “just-so story”? More self-contradictions!

dhw: …you will not even consider the possibility that this wide variety of adaptations might be the result of intelligent cells responding to new conditions in their own different ways.

DAVID: Your same old blather about super intelligent cells.

dhw: Why “super”? No one is suggesting that a change in the structure of certain cells is on a par with rocket science. You have agreed that cells are capable of minor autonomous adaptations. I don’t know where you draw the line between minor and major, but since the spiders are still spiders, I wouldn’t have thought these changes counted as major.

DAVID: Neither do I.

Oh! So why did you say God must have designed them?

dhw: And I’d better not ask why you think your God specially designed all these variations. Do we humans really need them or use them?

DAVID: Life requires active ecosystems as the one the spiders are in.

dhw: Of course it does. But that doesn’t mean that all active ecosystems (not to mention the millions of extinct ecosystems) have been specially designed for humans.

DAVID: All for our use.

God designed lots of different aquatic spiders and every ecosystem for the last 3.8 billion years for our use? I hope you enjoy your trilobite soup and your dinosaur steak.