Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, September 08, 2019, 15:25 (1682 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Once again, I don't question God's choices. I assume reality as God's works and the results are his choices. My God didn't worry about the time taken as He is timeless. You humanized God seems to fret about everything.

dhw: Once again, you don’t question your INTERPRETATION of God’s choices. He didn’t worry (how very human of him) about the time taken…Well of course not, because according to you he actually decided not to start fulfilling his one and only purpose for 3.X billion years, though you have no idea why.

DAVID: I have to use human words in describing God's thoughts. We don't have words just for God, and you know that.

dhw: I don’t know why you assume that your God’s thoughts cannot be described in human terms. You have no reason to suppose that his reasons for doing what he did are incomprehensible to humans.

Not incomprehensible, but our analysis of God's thoughts are all guesses as to his actual thoughts.

dhw: However, under “Natural Wonders and Evolution” we have at last established that H. sapiens was not his one and only purpose, so we can forget this whole business of him deciding to wait 3.X billion years. He wanted or desired a bush. And no, no, no, I don’t have him fretting. I have him wanting a bush and getting a bush. You had him wanting a human but having to make a bush because he’d decided to wait a few billion years, though you didn’t know why. A sort of bumbling, can’t-make-up-his-mind God – or a God that knew what he wanted but couldn’t work out how to do it.

Your version of my God is bumbling, but that is because your view of my God is so garbled. My God knows exactly what he is doing and is full of purposeful creative activity, and chose to evolve humans. God's works tell us that.

DAVID: God is my designer.

dhw: Perfectly understandable: he may have designed an autonomous mechanism instead of directly designing every life form, lifestyle, natural wonder, and let’s not forget bacterial responses to every situation they may encounter throughout life’s history.

Forgetting my God is in charge and would have given such a mechanism guidelines.

DAVID: Final thought: For weeks you have repeated the same complaint using a humanized concept of God, while I follow the well-accepted advice of Adler who is a philosopher of theology. Do you have any new thoughts?

dhw: No, but I’m delighted to see that you do, as is clear from your post under “Natural Wonders & Evolution”. We are making progress.

Not so clear.