Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Sunday, July 14, 2019, 13:01 (1748 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I have never thought that God's actions were 'totally incomprehensible'. That has always been your problem, not mine.

dhw: It’s not your God’s actions that are incomprehensible – it is your INTERPRETATION of his actions that makes no sense. You wrote:
DAVID “Of course I have ‘no idea’ why he chose to create through evolution.”
Let us remember that for you evolution means your God’s special design of all life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct. What is incomprehensible is that in your version, your God’s one and only purpose was to design H. sapiens, and you have no idea why he “chose” to do so by specially designing millions of other life forms etc.

DAVID: The bold is a total distortion of my view. I start with the Adler approach that humans are so special they had to be God's goal, and follow that by recognizing that humans arrived through an evolutionary process. Therefore, God chose to evolve humans. Very straight forward reasoning.

If humans had to be God’s goal, they were his purpose. Yes, humans arrived through evolution, and so did every other multicellular organism in the history of life. But you claim that “evolution” means your God specially designed ALL of them. And so you have no idea why your God chose to create humans (his only purpose) by specially designing millions of non-human life forms first. Where is the distortion?

DAVID: The 'no idea' issue is recognizing that God as a creator produced the universe in the beginning without evolving it's creation. Therefore, God might be seen as having direct creation ability, and might have the ability to directly create humans, but chose not to. If that is the case then I 'have no idea' why He chose evolution, but the evidence is that He likes to evolve: create the universe and evolve it, create the special Earth and evolve it, start life and evolve it. All entirely logical.

But what is not logical is that his one and only purpose was to “evolve” (which for you means specially design) humans, and yet he chose to “evolve” (= specially design) millions of NON-HUMAN life forms extant and extinct. You simply refuse to put your different fixed beliefs together, and it is the COMBINATION which you cannot explain: 1) single purpose; 2) your God always in control; 3) evolution means your God specially designs every life form, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder; 4) therefore, for 3.5 billion years he specially designed anything but the one thing he wanted to design.

dhw: […] you have no idea why he would have designed all the other non-human life forms, or even all the other non-sapiens forms of homo. He just “had to” do it this way.

DAVID: I have never said God 'had to do it this way.'

Repeated over and over again, e.g. 28 June at 10,08: “You are trying to deny God knew what he had to do to get from bacteria to humans.” According to you, what he did was specially design millions of non-human life forms. Why did he “have to” specially design millions of non-human life forms in order to “get” to the only life form he wanted?

DAVID: And as usual your have reviewed an unpurposed God from your imagination.

dhw: My starting point is that if God exists, he would know what he wants, and we have no reason to suppose that his logic will be incomprehensible to us, especially since there are several alternative hypotheses which are perfectly logical. It is also perfectly logical to assume that if he created our consciousness with all its attributes, there would be common ground between his attributes and ours. Of course ALL the hypotheses are guesswork (including the very existence of your God). But please note once more that unlike yours, none of my hypotheses represent a fixed belief – that is why I offer different hypotheses.

DAVID: The bolds above are exactly what I think. Your 'unfixed beliefs' lead you to imagine a very humanized God.

When I say he would know what he wants, I mean he has a purpose. He is not “unpurposed”. And yes, I offer purposes which we humans can understand. And I am delighted to see that you now agree at last that it is perfectly logical to assume that he and we may have common attributes. There is therefore no justification for dismissing logical alternative theories that entail human attributes in order to cling to the illogical four-part theory outlined above.