Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 19:17 (1703 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 19:56

dhw: Of course history tells us what happened! And for anyone who believes in God and evolution, of course it means that God chose evolution to evolve all organisms. But that does not mean he preprogrammed or dabbled them all.

DAVID: My interpretation is that God is the designer for all complex advances as the ID folks present. How else could those complex deigns appear with each speciation that involve many morphological rearrangements? My source for the obvious design is God.

dhw: I have always accepted the logic of your design argument. But “God chose evolution” does not have to mean that he designed every life form individually, and the whole problem arises when you insist that he did so for 3.X billion years in order to make them all eat or be eaten by one another until he could fulfil his one and only purpose of designing H. sapiens. You continue to split your theory up into acceptable snippets, whereas is it the COMBINATION of your fixed beliefs that makes no sense.

Your denial that God designed all the organisms in evolution is simply non-acceptance of my theory about God and what He does. As for the bolded sentence, it is quite clear to me, if not to you, a food supply most be provided for all those years of evolution. And you continue to ignore Adler's point of how special we are, as the prime clue to God's thinking. Please my entry of an Adler review today.

DAVID: A plan that builds from single cells to very complex multicellular forms (evolve) working toward an eventual goal of humans. Again your statement wonders why my conceptualized God isn't impatient straining to get to the human level of evolution as soon as possible. History tells us He took the time it took. My God makes decisions and patiently plans.

dhw: But he does not necessarily make the decisions you impose on him. History tells us it took time to get to humans. It doesn’t tell us that your God designed every non-human individual life form because he “had to” in order to fill in time until he designed the only thing he wanted to design.

My God does the designs as I interpret the history. You chose not to believe that point..

DAVID: My God is purposeful and does not invent tasks just to fill time.

dhw: You wrote: “He knew those designs were required interim goals to establish the necessary food supply to cover the time He knew he had decided to take.” If that isn’t “filling in time”, I don’t know what is. My God would also be purposeful, and if he did invent something, it would not be for the purpose of filling in time until he could design the only thing he wanted to design.

It is not filling time if the food supply is definitely required.

dhw: As above, wanting to create a bush is no more “humanizing” than wanting to create H. sapiens but having to create a bush first. But at least it is more logical than your God devising a plan which means that for 3.X billion years he “has to” do anything but what he wants to do.

DAVID: Same old problem. Your humanization of God demands that He should impatiently jump to His goal. Your view of God.

dhw: Your humanization of God demands that instead of fulfilling his one and only goal, he decides to take 3.X billion years to even start the process, and so he “has to” give himself the task of inventing all the other organisms. He is a veritable Hamlet of the Heavens: doing anything except - according to the goal you impose on him – the one thing he ought to be doing!

Once again you describe a bumbling Hamlet-like God who is simply drifting along, when He should think like a purpose-filled human and get the job done. I take care not to humanize Him. I try to explain Him by His works and nothing else, as espoused by Karen Johnson in her book, The History of God.