Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 10:42 (1689 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My God is not incomprehensible to me, only to your humanized concept of God. My logical explanation of what happened is God chose to evolve humans, and didn't care about the time it took.

But according to you, evolve = specially design, and according to you he also chose to evolve (= specially design) every other life form, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life! And according to you, H. sapiens was his one and only goal, and you wrote: “Haven’t you realized by now, I have no idea why God chose to evolve humans over time?” – which I take to mean you have no idea why your God chose to spend 3.X billion years specially designing the bush before he specially designed H. sapiens. If you have no idea, I would suggest that this theory of yours is incomprehensible to you.

DAVID: Further I have shown you that God has evolved everything He created, universe, Earth, life, and you have never commented on that point of evidence as to God's methods.

I have no quarrel at all with the theory that if God exists, he “evolved” all the above! My quarrel, for the umpteenth time, is with your theory that he did it all in order to produce H. sapiens! I much prefer your suggestion under “Natural Wonders & Evolution” that he “evolved” (which to you means specially designed) all the above, including the bush of life, which includes humans, to satisfy his wants and desires.

In this context, and in relation to the two extinctions you have drawn our attention to today (for which many thanks), you wrote: “… obviously a very stable environment is of most importance, for life to survive. The Earth has many protecting feed-back cycles.” Again, one can’t help wondering whether your always-in-control God deliberately destroyed all those species and, if so why, according to you, he specially designed them all in the first place if his only goal was humans. Alternatively, he did not cause the extinctions, in which case he was not always in control. So did he or didn’t he control the environmental changes that triggered evolutionary change?

DAVID: Your version of my God is bumbling […]

dhw: […] He only becomes bumbling when you insist that he specially designed every other multicellular organism although the only one he wanted to specially design was H. sapiens.

DAVID: Not bumbling. He is the creator, designer!

It is you who make the creator a bumbler by having him delay fulfilling his one and only purpose for reasons that are incomprehensible to you.

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.

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

dhw: Your “guidelines” have always meant nothing but preprogramming or direct dabbling – the direct opposite of autonomy. “Being in charge” is one of your weasel expressions. Your God would still have been “in charge” if he had decided to invent a mechanism that could make its own decisions (as you acknowledge with your firm belief in human free will). He could always intervene if he wanted to.

DAVID: No answer to my point God is always in full control.

No answer to my suggestion that he may have deliberately given up control in order to satisfy his wants and desires (as you acknowledge with your firm belief in human free will).