Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 25, 2019, 18:24 (1828 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: An 'ever changing spectacle' is humanizing God in the extreme. A purposeful God does not need spectacle. In my view, He fully knows what He wants as a goal, and accomplishes it.

dhw: I agree that your purposeful God would fully know and accomplish his goal, which you say was to produce humans. If you can speculate on that, why shouldn’t we speculate on possible purposes for producing the bush and humans? A while ago you volunteered enjoyment, wanting us to admire his work, and wanting a relationship with us. How do you know that a one-and-only God didn’t get fed up with his isolation? How do you know that he doesn’t produce things for enjoyment, or that he doesn’t have a range of feelings like ours: love, hate, boredom, fascination, pleasure, disgust, loneliness? Do you really believe a creator could create such things without knowing them himself? Of course we can only humanize, but that doesn’t mean that our humanizations are wrong.

But it also means we cannot know if speculations are in any way correct. What we do know assuming that God is in charge, and He chose to evolve humans from the first bacteria. That is historical fact.

dhw: The only evolutionary methods you propose are divine preprogramming and dabbling, which both entail special design. You apply this not only to the human brain but also to whale flippers, cuttlefish camouflage, monarch lifestyle and the construction of the weaverbird’s nest. And you have no idea why your God specially designed (preprogrammed/dabbled) all this when, according to you, he only wanted to specially design (preprogramme/dabble) us. It is YOU who have him diddling around!

Consider first life: It is extremely complex if it is to survive. And it is no where close to the complexity of an introspective human brain. You've accepted if God is in charge He has the right to evolve each and every of His goals. I persist in viewing God as choosing to evolve more and more complexity over the time necessary. No diddling. Each new advanced design may well require design planning considerations. Preprogramming or constant dabbling are each probabilities of method.

dhw: Not a reduction of powers of control! If God exists, cellular intelligence would denote his CHOICE not to control the history, but to allow it to run its own course, just as you believe he gave humans free will so that they could create their own history.

DAVID: […] In the final step, humans are allowed to control their actions (history), but not their evolution, which your bolded twisted logic implies.

dhw: Yet again you are missing the point of the analogy. If he was willing to give up control over human actions, why should he not have been willing to give up control over the direction of evolution? In both cases your “this is what will happen…” gives way to my “let’s see what will happen if…”

I didn't miss your 'logic'. Control of evolution is not at all equivalent to human choices of action in life.

[…]
DAVID: My reference is to the concept of convergence, the fact that the same thing develops over and over in evolution in many, many very different species, unrelated by the pattern of branching in the common descent from an original organism.

dhw: So your theory presumably would be that your God preprogrammed or dabbled all these different species to provide the same solutions when confronted by the same problems. My counter proposal would be that given the same problems, it is not surprising that different intelligences should come up with the same solutions.

DAVID: Only if such intelligence existed in cells. Remember I view cells as acting intelligently from God's instructions.

dhw: Yes, these are the alternatives: cellular intelligence versus a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or direct divine dabbling for every convergent solution, as these are the only forms of “instructions” you can come up with.

Can you come up with other methods of instructing, considering God is running the show in full command?