Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Friday, January 01, 2021, 11:07 (1210 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It makes no difference where you started from or how firm and unshakeable your belief may be: both of us accept evolution as a fact, but you have no idea why, if your God’s goal was H. sapiens, he directly designed millions of life forms, natural wonders etc. that had no connection with humans or with their food supply. If you cannot find a logical reason why he would have done so, the inference has to be that this particular part of your theory may be wrong.

DAVID: There is no inference on my part, that I am wrong. it is perfectly logical for God to chose to evolve humans by designing every stage. It is all your problem. For God creates all of history.

As usual, you focus on one part of your theory (God designing every stage of human evolution), omitting the rest of it: if his sole purpose was to design every stage of human evolution, why did he directly design millions of life forms, strategies etc. that had no connection with humans? You have no idea. Please stop backpedalling.

dhw: I offer different theories to show how different methods can fit in with different “primacies”. Two of my theories (experimentation and getting new ideas as he goes along) allow for H. sapiens as your unknown “primacy”.

DAVID: You're just back to defending a humanized sort of God you envision.

dhw: I am back to offering different theories, the logic of which even you acknowledge, and although you desperately wish you had never said it, you have underlined their logic by agreeing (and why would you not agree?) that your God probably has thought patterns and emotions with some similarity to ours.

DAVID: And I'll stick to obviously God uses logic we we do. As for His own emotions and other thought patterns, they are unknown to us and we both can guess that they have some similarity to ours. It still does not tell either of us why He chose to create history the way He did.

No it doesn’t. That is why I offer different theories concerning what might have been his purpose and method (if he exists). You can see the logic behind every single one. The only theory on offer which leaves you with no idea why he would have chosen a particular method to achieve a particular purpose is yours.

Every Life Is on Fire (entered on the Egnor thread)

DAVID: Whatever life is it requires a constant source of energy: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/371/6524/38?utm_campaign=toc_sci-mag_2020-12-31

Nobody can possibly deny this obvious truth!

QUOTE: "It is rare for modern science to engage ancient religious texts; these traditions are more often nonoverlapping magisteria (2), if not fundamentally incompatible. Every Life Is on Fire shows that scripture can enrich our scientific interest in living systems, providing an ethical, moral, and even spiritual context. For the reader willing to brave metaphorical land mines, there is much to be learned by exploring the border regions, whether between physics and biology, between science and religion, or between life and lifeless matter.

DAVID: There is more to life than just matter. The metaphysical and the source of energy to be absorbed are equally important. Just matter is one portion of the considerations. Teh materialists view is half baked.

Of course there is more to life than matter, and more ways to approach it than through science. Materialists don’t have to deny the existence, importance or teaching qualities of ethics, morals, culture, art, music, religion, philosophy etc! How does this prove that we have free will, or that consciousness is not an emergent product of the brain, as you claim in your materialist role?