Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, August 13, 2022, 18:25 (628 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: My belief is not a dodge, but analyzes in a way you do not. All of evolution is God's designs and all of those branches which did not lead to us created the huge food supply we need now.

dhw: So your God deliberately designed every single form of life and every econiche throughout 3.X billion years to lead either to us to our food bush, although “the current bush of food is NOW for humans NOW. There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms” and “extinct life [which formed the bushes of the past for the past] has no role in current time”. And you have no idea why your all-powerful, all-purposeful God was unable to design his only goal (us and our food) without all these countless precursors, even though apparently he was perfectly capable of designing species without precursors. And your theories make sense only to God, i.e. not to you.

This statement of yours shows how strangely you view God. I view all-powerful, all-purposeful God as knowing exactly what He has to do and wishes to do to produce humans. And the current history of evolution is that exact result. You are simply second=guessing God with your human mind. I don't do that as I try to analyze God's works.>

dhw: Same as usual. You accept your THEORIES about what God did, and why he did it, and your theories don’t make sense to you.

Your psychoanalysis of me is wrong. My theories make sense to me, if not to you.

DAVID: Constant misinterpretation. God's form of His own emotion of love may parallel ours but may not be exactly like our form. Samo old allegory approach, of course. And God knows exactly about our form of love. Why did you pose that question?

dhw: I want to know what you mean by “allegorical”. You agree that a Creator could have endowed us with emotions and thought patterns of his own, offer us a vision of God which includes just such emotions and patterns, complain if I do the same, and come up with “allegorical” emotion, which you then refuse to define.

I have defined it. When we say God loves, His form of love is His personal form of love, and we cannot know how it resembles ours

dhw: […] why do you think a single-minded designer (don’t forget the manner in which you compared yourself to him when talking of design) is less human than an experimental scientist, or an artist coming up with new ideas as he goes along?

DAVID: The comparison to humans shows immediately how you humanize God in your imagination.

dhw: You dismissed my proposal that God may have enabled cells to do their own designing as “secondhand” design, and called on your own experience as a designer (much better to do it yourself). Wouldn't you call this "humanizing", and why is is less humanizing than a God who enables organisms to do their own designing, just as he enables humans to do their own designing?

Of course, God has human attributes, as shown by human purposes and God's purposes. We design at our level and He a this. Has any human created life? How could living cells change a form of life?

Adler

dhw: […] if your theories of evolution “make sense only to God”, no amount of Adler worship is going to make them intelligible to anyone.

DAVID: Adler's works are highly respected world-wide. He advised the Catholic Church as a philosopher of religion!!!

dhw: I am not discussing Adler’s importance. I am discussing your theories, which by your own admission “make sense only to God”. That means even Adler would not have understood them – and I doubt if he even knew about those we have been discussing on this thread, since you always emphasize that his work is dedicated to the importance of humans as evidence for the existence of God and does NOT cover those theories.

Adler would agree God's reasons make sense to God, but we are not privy to them. He analyzes as I do. Without reading his instruction book "How to think about God", from my secondhand comments about him, your still know nothing about him. You have no knowledge how a philosopher of religion approaches the issue of thinking about God.