New Miscellany 1: evol theories and future; humanization (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, June 01, 2025, 00:08 (1 day, 15 hours, 44 min. ago) @ dhw

Evolution and “culling”

DAVID: God did not tell me why He chose to evolve us when direct creation is simpler.

dhw: Correction: God did not tell you THAT he chose to evolve us by designing and culling 99.9 irrelevant species out of 100. And you would have a hard job telling him how inefficient he is. But you simply can’t imagine that your omniscient, omnipotent God might not be such a blunderer, and might for instance have chosen to allow his invention to do its own designing – as a kind of parallel to the free will which you do believe he granted to humans. An almighty free-for-all, though he could intervene if he wanted to. So much more interesting than a puppet show in which he pulls all the strings. And that’s just one alternative.

Your alternative Gods are all very human. My God knows exactly what He is doin g with all- out purpose.

DAVID: Evolution is not some mysterious process mismanaged by God. It is cumbersome and inefficient compared to direct creation.

dhw: And you have no idea why your all-powerful, all-knowing God chose to design and then cull 99.9 irrelevant species out of 100 in order to produce a species (plus food) he could have produced directly. Hence your ridicule of his inefficiency. Thank you for this confirmation.

DAVID: You are welcome.

dhw: You have just confirmed the absurdity of your theory.

I just welcomed the last of your constant absurdities about how to interpret the evolution of humans as done by God.

God’s human thought patterns and emotions

DAVID: Of course we know what our terms mean to us but NOT to God. We discuss Him at our level. It is a fact not a simple game.

dhw: When you suggest that your God enjoys, is interested, wants recognition, wants to be worshipped, may or may not love us etc. you are not asking whether he defines these words differently from the way we do, but whether he does or does not have the same thought patterns and emotions as we mean by those words. Please stop dodging.

DAVID: Open your mind to accept God is not us and what we assign to Him may not mean the same thing to Him in our terms.

dhw: But we are only interested in whether he does or doesn’t have the attributes we assign to him in our terms. Does he enjoy/does he want to be worshipped/does he love us? Not how might his dictionary define enjoy/worship/love? You are simply dodging the fact that you cannot use "humanization" as an argument against my alternative theories, since you "humanize" as much as I do. And why shouldn't we assume that the creations might reflect aspects of their creator?

we certainly might reflect God's aspects.

End of evolution?

DAVID: Evolution is over. […] What ‘new conditions’ do you imagine. I see none.
But later:
DAVID: This current episode of evolution is over. A new episode after a major change is possible.

dhw: If it is possible that there will be new episodes of evolution, then it is clearly absurd to say that evolution is over. Thank you. That should be the end of this discussion.

DAVID: Please reread my response: "this episode is over". Any new evolution may be in a different form of it.

dhw: You kept repeating that “evolution is over”. Suddenly you changed to “this episode”. Of course if there is more evolution to come, there will be different forms of life. That’s what has always happened. You have absolutely no way of knowing what might happen to this planet during the next million/billion/three billion years, and since you agree that new “episodes” are possible, it is absurd to say that “evolution is over”. Why are you prolonging this discussion?

Our sun has a standard life expectancy. Life will certainly end with its end.