Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Saturday, August 10, 2019, 12:22 (1714 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ..if he [God] exists, the history tells us that he created a huge and ever changing bush of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct. What makes no sense is the claim that all of them were specially designed, and yet his only purpose was to specially design H. sapiens.

DAVID: I'm not hiding behind 'evolution'. God chose to evolve the universe, the Earth, and all of life!

dhw: If God exists, then of course he did precisely that. But yet again ad nauseam: for you evolution means your God specially designed every life form, and the purpose of his designing every non-human life form was to design one life form – H. sapiens. THAT is the illogical combination that you try to gloss over by focusing solely on our shared belief that the universe, the Earth and life evolved.

DAVID: […] you accept above that He created the bush, which led to humans. I view teh bush as a requirement for food supply.

dhw: And so in order to achieve his sole purpose of specially designing H. sapiens, he specially designs millions and millions of non-human life forms (plus lifestyles and natural wonders) so that they can eat or be eaten by one another until he specially designs the only thing he wants to design. You have “no idea” why he chose this totally illogical method of achieving his purpose, and you accept the logic of my alternative explanations but reject them because they do not fit in with your dehumanized preconceptions about God’s nature. Perhaps we should leave it at that.

DAVID: I have bolded the inconsistencies in your statements. You agree that God 'possibly'ran the process of evolution, but then deny the possibility that God designed every step in evolution, which is what I believe. We can end of that.

I did not say he “ran it”. You know very well that my own proposal is that, if he exists, he created the higgledy-piggledy bush by inventing a mechanism through which evolution ran itself by means of autonomous cellular intelligence. What I deny is exactly what I have written above: the possibility that he specially designed every single life form (plus every single lifestyle and natural wonder) to eat or be eaten by one another, and he did so with the sole purpose of designing H. sapiens. This is your concept of evolution, and you keep admitting that you have no idea why he would have chosen such a method to achieve such a purpose. Once more, it is the COMBINATION of these two hypotheses that makes no sense, but this combination is your fixed belief and you won't budge. That, then, is the point at which I think we can end this discussion

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Thank you for the two posts on genome/cellular complexity, which you conclude could not be the result of chance. In your post on the “Reality” thread, you wrote: “We agree lots of the time.” You are right. These important articles highlighting the astonishing complexities even of micro-organisms are the best possible evidence for the existence of a designer and, together with certain kinds of psychic experience, they are the factors that lead me to reject atheism, although as you know there are other factors that also lead me to reject theism. (More fool me, as one –ism has to be the right answer to all our unanswered questions.) I am painfully aware that there is an imbalance in our discussions, since most of my posts are critiques of your own, so I am taking this opportunity to redress the balance and also to thank you again for this wonderful, on-going education.