Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, July 14, 2019, 18:43 (1747 days ago) @ dhw

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.
dhw: 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?

You have distorted again by totally twisting my explanation: I have stated my belief is that God chose to evolve humans, starting with bacteria. Recognizing that God, as creator, created the universe , it appears He has complete powers of direct creation, but with humans, we see they appeared through evolution. Therefore, it is obvious God chose to evolve humans by directing evolution, designing all stages on the way. You are simply denying He is a designer through evolution. But as I have shown He created the universe and evolved it, created the Earth and evolved it to support life, created life and evolved it to humans. Direct creation and then evolution is his obvious methodology. You do not directly discuss this approach to understanding God's actions. You revert to 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.

dhw: 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.

This view of yours is that God is not really purposeful from the beginning and has no idea of how to conduct purposeful activity to achieve a goal. You imply a confused God who dithered around with all of the bush of life rather than directly creating humans. The bush of life was a necessary initial creation to provide the ecosystems that support all of life, including humans. God knows what He is doing even if you don't.

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.

dhw: 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.

Your logical alternatives ignore the series of logical steps I have presented above about God's motives and methods of action, while you continue to humanize your concept of God.