Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Sunday, July 07, 2019, 11:26 (1748 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God ran evolution and produced the history we see. His goal was to eventually evolve humans. You think I am describing a confused and goalless God. I am not. God knew what He was doing all along.

dhw: I have no problem with the concept of your God knowing what he was doing all along. It is you who cannot solve the problem of why, if this is so, and his one and only goal was to eventually specially design humans, he “had to” specially design every other non-human life form. Experimentation, for instance, is neither confused nor goalless. Creation for the pleasure of creation is neither confused nor goalless. Seeing what will happen if...is neither confused nor goalless. Wanting to design only humans but specially designing millions of non-human life forms is nothing if not confusing.

DAVID: Why you are so confused is simple to solve. You accept that God ran evolution. Just accept the idea that God was always goal oriented, and chose to run evolution to produce humans as an end product.

If God exists, I accept that he started evolution, have no doubt he would have had a goal in doing so, but can see absolutely no logic in your proposal that he specially designed every non-human life form, lifestyle and natural wonder for the sole purpose of ending up with humans. Please “just accept the idea” that there are other interpretations of goal and method that make far more sense. See above.

DAVID: My position is quite clear. Any guesses as to why He chose this path have been discussed over and over, and are all just guesses, many of which are logical, but the logicality does not prove they are correct. They are equivalent to angels on pin heads.

dhw: But at least if they are logical we can say they are logical. You simply cannot find a logical reason for your own guess combining (a) his goal and (b) his method of achieving that goal. Logic therefore suggests that one of these two guesses might be wrong.

DAVID: See above. It is your confusion, not mine. If God chose to evolve humans from bacteria, and designed the entire process as I believe, then everything makes perfect sense. You persist in splitting it up.

It does not make perfect sense that he should have had one goal (humans) and specially designed billions of life forms etc. in order to reach his one goal. You have confessed that you “have no idea” why he would have chosen such a method, so please stop telling us that it makes perfect sense.

DAVID (commenting on “Balance of Nature”, re beavers): All part of the important balance of nature as created by God in his management of evolution. In my view humans were the goal of the creation of the entire process.

dhw: A total non sequitur. All ecosystems require some kind of balance if they are to survive. Now please tell us why your God specially designed beavers (not to mention whale flippers and weaverbirds’ nests) when all he actually wanted to do was specially design humans.

DAVID: As always the need for ecosystems to provide eaten energy so evolution could cover 3.8 billion years of time.

So God’s purpose in designing all these systems was for evolution to take 3.8 billion years (plus presumably the future). Or do you mean he said to himself: “I wanner specially design H. sapiens, and although I’m in full control, I have to take 3.5+ billion years to do it, so I gotta design something else in the meantime”?