New Miscellany 1: Inventing God, first cause, our brain. (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, June 15, 2025, 18:02 (12 days ago) @ dhw

Humanization

dhw: You said yourself that he must enjoy creating or he would not do it, and interest in his own creations does not imply entertainment.

DAVID: Your God wants a free-for-all to be entertained.

dhw: That is your word, not mine, and I don’t like it. So let us consider the implications. You agree that at least the behaviour of us free-willed humans is a free-for-all. If he finds our free-willed, self-inflicted sufferings entertaining (just watch the world news for examples), then he is a sadist. Another possibility is that he’s got fed up with us and is no longer interested. (Of course the atheist alternative is that he doesn’t exist.)You claim that yours is the accepted biblical version of God. That’s even worse, since it is he who slaughters men, women and children because he doesn’t like their free-for-all behaviour. Even your beloved Adler only gives us a 50/50 chance that his God loves us. So what is the other 50? Either he couldn’t care less, or he hates us. One theme that never stops recurring in the Bible is that we must love God and worship him. And yet you believe he has no self-interest. What saves you from considering these possibilities? I quote: “I first choose a form of God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.” In other words, you twist reality to fit in with your preconceptions. (NB I am NOT saying that he is a sadist. I am pointing out that the biblical version of God is open to such interpretations.)

DAVID: Since we have no direct knowledge of God our personal God is what each of us invents. I start with omniscient, all powerful, and ignore all of the OT pronouncements you deplore.

dhw: You have “invented” a theory of evolution which ridicules your omniscient, all-powerful God as being a messy, cumbersome and inefficient designer, and you have claimed that your invented God is the accepted biblical version but you proceed to ignore all those parts of the Bible that you don’t like. You agree that he may well have thought patterns and emotions in common with us (e.g. enjoyment, interest, desire to be recognized and worshipped, love) but reject any theory which arises from such common characteristics. Your invention leads you to one self-contradiction after another, but you refuse to consider even the possibility that at least part of it might be wrong.

I assume, as you must, that any discussion of God accepts that He created our reality which means He controlled evolution, a messy way to achieve His goal, us. Recognize evolution has a directionality toward the more complex and we are the most complex with our brain. We interpret that God's love is involved, but Adler cautions 50/50, which suggests all discussions about God are guesswork, based upon individual prejudice. Accepting God created us, He must have some sort of interest in us. Anything deeper is guesswork.

DAVID: I use the interpretation in the book: "In the beginning of" by Judah Landa, 2004, 178 pgs.

dhw: It’s no use telling us what books you have read if you can’t produce any arguments to refute the above or to defend your own theories. For instance, does Judah Landa provide us with biblical evidence that your God messily and inefficiently designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to his sole purpose? Has he found evidence of mistranslation in the passages of the Bible which describe God’s various murderous slaughters or his instructions to the Jews to do their own slaughtering, or his desire to be worshipped?

DAVID: My thoughts are unknown to Landa. He only retranslated Genesis.

dhw: Since he offers no support for your theories, why did you even mention him?

As a Biblical scholar He offers no criticisms of God as you do.

Introducing the brain: real or imaginary

QUOTE: "The fusiform gyrus is involved in high-level visual processing, such as identifying objects and people's faces from their appearance. The study suggests that during imagination, the signal strength is weaker compared with during perception; this difference in signal strength enables the brain to distinguish between the two. That is, if the activity crosses a certain threshold, the brain interprets it as reality.”

dhw: I’d have thought it was obvious that the “real” level processes information from outside, and no such process is needed for the “imaginary” level. But which part of the brain is watching the fusiform gyrus to tell us that it’s working at different levels?

The frontal cortex.

DAVID: Our brain must have a control of this sort, since we have such enormous intellectual capacity for imagination. I think lower forms of brains do not have this and it is a de novo development.

dhw: I’ve had to consult the Internet. Just to clarify: Dogs and chimps have their own fusiform gyrus. We assume they don’t have our level of imagination, but since this is only a matter of “signal strength”, clearly it is an evolutionary development of an existing part of the brain, as are so many of our “extras”. The term “de novo” could be misleading.

Did the environmental challenges to our survival require such a brain, as per Darwin? No, it is overkill.