https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/03/250306122924.htm

"The team from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) investigated rock layers in the North Pole Dome -- an area of the Pilbara region of Western Australia -- and found evidence of a major meteorite impact 3.5 billion years ago.

***

"'Before our discovery, the oldest impact crater was 2.2 billion years old, so this is by far the oldest known crater ever found on Earth," Professor Johnson said.

"Researchers discovered the crater thanks to 'shatter cones', distinctive rock formations only formed under the intense pressure of a meteorite strike.

"The shatter cones at the site, about 40 kilometres west of Marble Bar in WA's Pilbara region, were formed when a meteorite slammed into the area at more than 36,000km/h.

"This would have been a major planetary event, resulting in a crater more than 100km wide that would have sent debris flying across the globe.

***

"Until now, the absence of any truly ancient craters means they are largely ignored by geologists.

"'This study provides a crucial piece of the puzzle of Earth's impact history and suggests there may be many other ancient craters that could be discovered over time."

"Co-lead author Professor Chris Kirkland, also from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the discovery shed new light on how meteorites shaped Earth's early environment.

***

"'It...radically refines our understanding of crust formation: the tremendous amount of energy from this impact could have played a role in shaping early Earth's crust by pushing one part of the Earth's crust under another, or by forcing magma to rise from deep within the Earth's mantle toward the surface.

"'It may have even contributed to the formation of cratons, which are large, stable landmasses that became the foundation of continents.'"

Comment: Compare this 67 mile-wide crater to Chixculub at ten miles-wide. Then note that life was just in beginning stages at this point in time. And survived!!

https://www.universetoday.com/167353/a-mission-to-find-10-million-near-earth-asteroids-...

"So far, scientists have found around 34,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) that could serve as humanity’s stepping stone to the stars. These balls of rock and ice hold valuable resources as we expand throughout the solar system, making them valuable real estate in any future space economy. But the 34,000 we know of only make up a small percentage of the total number of asteroids in our vicinity – some estimates theorize that up to 1 billion asteroids larger than a modern car exist near Earth. A project from the Trans Astronautics Corp (TransAstra), an asteroid-hunting start-up based in California, hopes to find the missing billion.

***

"To put it bluntly, the problem is twofold—brightness and speed. Most ground-based observatories have long exposure times, allowing them to capture brighter but more stationary objects. NEAs, on the other hand, zip by the planet quickly and typically are so faint that the long exposure times on most observatories fail to see them at all. Since they move multiple pixels during each exposure, they don’t appear bright enough to capture in this kind of survey.

***

"Sutter Ultra would be three separate systems, each containing over one hundred 30 cm telescopes. They would fly in coordination in a type of orbit called a heliocentric Psuedo Geocentric Distant Retrograde (PRO) oribt. This would allow all three spacecraft to regularly focus on Earth and triangulate their readings in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

"Once the data has been captured, TransAstra has developed an algorithm to track individual asteroids on the paths they could travel throughout the image. They also released a neat explainer video that details the process they use and how it’s superior to existing asteroid tracking techniques.

"The company’s calculations show that it is by far superior. Their write-up for the Sutter Ultra project estimates that the program could find 300x the total number of NEAs humanity has ever found in only its first year of operation. That would garner an astonishing 10 million asteroid finds every year, or 19 every minute of every day. And yet, it would still only be 1% of the total number of NEAs out there.

"If that wasn’t enough reason to be interested in the project, Sutter Ultra can also be used to track space debris, which is becoming an ever-increasing problem as most and most junk starts to fill the orbital space. Plenty of companies have developed business models around deorbiting space junk or zapping it with lasers, but if it lives up to the hype, Sutter Ultra would be by far the best way to track it."

Comment: If we plan to be on Earth for a long time, this project is a must do.

https://www.livescience.com/space/asteroids/car-size-asteroid-discovered-2-days-ago-fli...

"An asteroid discovered Tuesday (April 9) made an extremely close, but harmless, pass by planet Earth today (April 11).

"Asteroid 2024 GJ2 is roughly the size of a car and, since its discovery this week, astronomers calculated that the space rock would graze by Earth at a mere 12-thousand-mile (19.3-thousand-kilometer) distance — that's just three percent the distance between the Earth and the moon. 2024 GJ2 measures between 2.5 and 5 meters (8.2 and 16 feet), according to the European Space Agency (ESA). This means it's an asteroid with a weight-class that would have burned up in Earth's atmosphere, if its orbit happened to intersect ours more directly.

"Astronomers believe the asteroid's closest approach distance to Earth occurred at 2:28:42 p.m. EDT (18:28:42 GMT) on Thursday, at a distance of 7,641 miles (12,298 kilometers)."

Comment: discovery two days earlier. Is that enough time to send up a diverting rocket? The asteroid is tiny compared to Chicxulub, but if one of this size hits, the locality won't enjoy it.

https://sciencealert.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3996984deafc554c16e8bdad6&id...

"Depending on your location, the newly found asteroid 2023 EY will pass by our planet late Thursday night or Friday morning at a distance of just 240,000 kilometers (149,000 miles) – a little less than two-thirds the distance of the Moon.

"That may sound uncomfortably close, but space is big. A speck like 2023 EY poses no threat to any of us.

"At just 16 meters (52 feet) in diameter, it's roughly the same size as the Chelyabinsk meteor that exploded over Siberia in 2013 and caused a range of injuries with its shock wave. Fortunately 2023 EY won't even enter our atmosphere.

***

"What's particularly cool is that this asteroid was only first spotted on Monday, March 13.

"It was picked up by a telescope at the Sutherland Observing Station in South Africa – which is one of four telescopes that make up the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) network, established by the University of Hawaii and funded by NASA to provide an asteroid impact early warning system.

"With two telescopes in Hawaii, one in Chile, and one in South Africa, the goal of ATLAS is to be able to get at least a few days of notice before an asteroid gets uncomfortably close to Earth.

"And now we know that we can successfully throw an asteroid off its course using rockets, thanks to the recent DART mission, this advanced warning will be crucial.

"2023 EY is classified as an Apollo NEO, or near-Earth object. This is the biggest group of NEOs we currently know about, with 17,540 Apollo asteroids as of February 2023."

Comment: with all these telescopes on watch we have a marked degree of safety.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-space-radar-will-hunt-planet-threatening...

"A new tool promises to ramp up this brand of science by offering more detailed astronomical radar capabilities than ever before. The team behind a pioneering radar system at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia released their first results last month at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society, revealing unprecedented detail on the moon and detecting a near-Earth asteroid. The telescope’s novel radar system, called Next Generation Radar (ngRADAR), “produced results that were beyond expectations,” says Flora Paganelli, a project scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s (NRAO’s) radar division.

***

"The ngRADAR system uses the Green Bank Telescope as a huge transmitting antenna, and it uses the Very Long Baseline Array of radio telescopes spread across the U.S., Hawaii and the Virgin Islands as a miles-wide receiver. Green Bank has a 100-meter-diameter dish—a radio telescope’s equivalent of a mirror—making it the largest steerable antenna on Earth, uniquely suited to this job.

***

"Tracking asteroids is great fun for planetary scientists, who scour these chunks of rock for clues to our solar system’s past, and it’s also crucial for humanity. The best chance we have of protecting ourselves against Earth-bound asteroids is by detecting them early and learning about their properties, such as their size and density. “The sooner we know about the risk and the more we know about the object, the better we can address the situation,” Taylor says.

"The ngRADAR system is coming online at a particularly critical time for planetary defense and radio astronomy. After the catastrophic collapse of Puerto Rico’s famed Arecibo Observatory, only one other active radar astronomy facility remains: NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar, part of the Deep Space Network, which communicates with spacecraft across the solar system. Putting all of humanity’s eggs in Goldstone’s basket is a particularly risky move, especially because it “recently experienced an 18-month-long failure, leaving us without an essential planetary defense capability for an extended period of time,” says planetary scientist Jean-Luc Margot of the University of California, Los Angeles. The ngRADAR system helps to fill the gap left by Arecibo and complements the existing Goldstone facility, strengthening humanity’s lines of defense.

***

"The team also plans to harness the capabilities of the upcoming expansion of the Very Large Array, known as ngVLA, which will make ngRADAR the most sophisticated planetary radar in history over the coming decade. “In this future configuration, the system will exceed Arecibo's sensitivity and allow detections at larger distances,” Margot says."

Comment: dhw will a why God made dangerous asteroids. I don't know but we have the God-give brains to fight them.

https://www.progressnews.network/2019/07/26/asteroid-2019-ok-just-missed-earth-and-scie...

"An undated image of an asteroid in space. NASA confirmed that on Thursday Asteroid 2019 OK passed about 73,000 kilometers from Earth, roughly one-fifth the distance to the moon.

***

"This asteroid wasn’t one that scientists had been tracking and it had seemingly appeared from “out of nowhere,” Michael Brown, a Melbourne-based observational astronomer, told The Post. According to data from NASA, the craggy rock was large, roughly 100 meters wide, and moving quickly along a path that brought it within about 73,000 kilometers of Earth. That’s one-fifth of the distance to the moon and what Duffy considers “uncomfortably close.”

“'It snuck up on us pretty quickly,” said Brown, an associate professor with Australia’s Monash University’s School of Physics and Astronomy. He later noted, “People are only sort of realizing what happened pretty much after it’s already flung past us.”

"The asteroid’s presence was only discovered earlier this week by separate astronomy teams in Brazil and the United States. Information about its size and path was announced just hours before it rocketed past Earth, Brown said.

“'It shook me out my morning complacency,” he said. “It’s probably the largest asteroid to pass this close to Earth in quite a number of years.”

"So how did the event almost go unnoticed?

"First, there’s the issue of size, Duffy said. Asteroid 2019 OK is a sizable chunk of rock, but it’s nowhere near as big as the ones capable of causing an event like the dinosaurs’ extinction. More than 90 percent of those asteroids, which are 1 kilometer or larger, have already been identified by NASA and its partners (my bold)

***

"The last-minute detection is yet another sign of how much remains unknown about space and a sobering reminder of the very real threat asteroids can pose, Duffy said.
“It should worry us all quite frankly,” he said. “It’s not a Hollywood movie. It is a clear and present danger.”

"Duffy said astronomers have a nickname for the kind of space rock that just came so close to Earth: “City-killer asteroids.” If the asteroid had struck Earth, most of it would have probably reached the ground, resulting in devastating damage, Brown said.

***

"Scientists are working on developing at least two approaches to deflecting potentially harmful asteroids, Duffy said. One strategy involves gently pushing the asteroid slowly over time off its course and away from Earth, he said. The other, which he called a “very elegant solution,” is the gravity tractor. If an asteroid is detected early enough, it could be possible to divert it using the gravity of a spacecraft, according to NASA.

"People shouldn’t try to “blast it with a nuke,” Duffy said.

“'It makes for a great Hollywood film,” he said. “The challenge with a nuke is that it may or not work, but it would definitely make the asteroid radioactive.”

"In light of Asteroid 2019 OK, Duffy stressed the importance of investing in a “global dedicated approach” to detecting asteroids because “sooner or later there will be one with our name on it. It’s just a matter of when, not if.”

“'We don’t have to go the way of the dinosaurs,” he said. “We actually have the technology to find and deflect certainly these smaller asteroids if we commit to it now.'”

Comment: WOW! At least we know about the big, big ones that wiped out the dinosaurs.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/16/a-massive-crater-hides-beneath-greenlands-ice/

"There’s something big lurking beneath Greenland’s ice. Using airborne ice-penetrating radar, scientists have discovered a 31-kilometer-wide crater — larger than the city of Paris — buried under as much as 930 meters of ice in northwest Greenland.

"The meteorite that slammed into Earth and formed the pit would have been about 1.5 kilometers across, researchers say. That’s large enough to have caused significant environmental damage across the Northern Hemisphere, a team led by glaciologist Kurt Kjær of the University of Copenhagen reports November 14 in Science Advances.

"Although the crater has not been dated, data from glacial debris as well as ice-flow simulations suggest that the impact may have happened during the Pleistocene Epoch, between 2.6 million and 11,700 years ago. The discovery could breathe new life into a controversial hypothesis that suggests that an impact about 13,000 years ago triggered a mysterious 1,000-year cold snap known as the Younger Dryas.

***

"The object is almost certainly an impact crater, the researchers say. “It became clear that our idea had been right from the beginning,” Kjær says. What’s more, it is not only the first crater found in Greenland, but also one of the 25 or so largest craters yet spotted on Earth. And it has held its shape beautifully, from its elevated rim to its bowl-shaped depression. (my bold)

***

"On the ground, the team hunted for geochemical and geologic signatures of an asteroid impact within nearby sediments. Sampling from within the crater itself was impossible, as it remains covered by ice. But just beyond the edge of the ice, meltwater from the base of the glacier had, over the years, deposited sediment. The scientists collected a sediment sample from within that glacial outwash and several from just outside of it.

"The outwash sample contained several telltale signs of an impact: “shocked” quartz grains with deformed crystal lattices and glassy grains that may represent flash-melted rock. The sample also contained elevated concentrations of certain elements, including nickel, cobalt, platinum and gold, relative to what’s normally found in Earth’s crust. That elemental profile points not only to an asteroid impact, the researchers say, but also suggests that the impactor was a relatively rare iron meteorite."

Comment: This shows why the existing asteroids need to be identified and monitored and we learn how to block t hem. Obviously Chixculub was the last of the big ones.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05969-2?utm_source=briefing-dy&utm_mediu...

"A NASA-funded telescope network devoted to detecting space rocks that could crash into Earth will expand into the Southern Hemisphere, which currently lacks a large-scale asteroid-surveillance effort. The additional observatories will not only spot asteroids that could harm people, but also detect comets, supernovae and other benign celestial objects.

"NASA confirmed on 13 August that it will provide US$3.8 million over the next 4 years to support the construction and operation of two asteroid-hunting observatories south of the Equator. Researchers plan to build one facility in South Africa, but are still deciding on a location for the second outpost. The observatories will join two existing telescopes on the islands of Maui and Hawaii as part of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), which is run by the University of Hawaii.

"Three Northern Hemisphere observatories, including ATLAS, spotted more than 95% of the 2,057 near-Earth asteroids discovered in 2017. But these northern surveys are blind to roughly 30% of the southern sky — and to any asteroids in that region that could hit Earth.

“'By placing telescopes in the Southern Hemisphere, you’ll enhance the ability to protect the planet,” says Tim Spahr of the astronomy consultancy NEO Sciences near Boston, Massachusetts. “There will always be things we can’t see from the north.”

***

"The southern ATLAS units’ primary purpose, however, will be to spot relatively small asteroids that bigger telescopes miss. The asteroid that scientists believe wiped out the dinosaurs was 9 kilometres in diameter, but much smaller space rocks can also inflict serious damage. The mid-air explosion of a 20-metre asteroid in 2013 resulted in burns, cuts and broken bones for people in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia. And researchers think that a 50-metre asteroid devastated thousands of square kilometres of Russian forest in the 1908 Tunguska event.

***

"...the current ATLAS telescopes shine at picking out small objects that are much closer to Earth — within 7.5 million kilometres of the planet. They do so by conducting relatively rapid scans of the entire sky, which gives researchers more opportunities to detect diminutive asteroids as soon as the objects are visible from the ground.

"ATLAS also has software optimized to detect fast-moving objects. As a result, the network can spot asteroids roughly the size of the Chelyabinsk and Tunguska rocks a few days to a week before impact, says John Tonry, the founder and principal investigator of ATLAS, who is based at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, in Honolulu. In early June, the system proved its mettle by providing data on the trajectory of a 1.8-metre asteroid called 2018 LA that swept over Africa. Researchers were subsequently able to find fragments of this space rock in Botswana. Since it started making observations in 2015, ATLAS has discovered 171 asteroids whose path brings them close to Earth’s orbit.

"Establishing relatively inexpensive ATLAS systems in the south will enable astronomers “to cover the entire night sky every day or two to provide as much warning as we can”, says Lindley Johnson, planetary defence officer for NASA in Washington DC.

"After the southern ATLAS observatories come online, “we’ll have close to round-the-clock coverage of the night sky”, says Larry Denneau, an ATLAS co-principal investigator at the University of Hawaii. “The more eyes you have looking, the better.'”

Comment: A necessary protection the dinosaurs wish they had.

https://phys.org/news/2018-06-unconfirmed-near-earth.html

"Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are small solar system bodies whose orbits sometimes bring them close to the Earth, potentially threatening a collision. NEOs are tracers of the composition, dynamics and environmental conditions throughout the solar system and of the history of our planetary system. Most meteorites come from NEOs, which are thus one of our key sources of knowledge about the solar system's development. Because some of them are easier to reach with spacecraft than the Moon or planets, NEOs are potential targets for NASA missions. The total number of known NEOs exceeds 18000. The discovery rate has risen rapidly recently, driven by in part the 1998 mandate of Congress to identify 90 percent of NEOs larger than 1 km (in 2005 Congress, recognizing the danger posed even by smaller NEOs, extended the mandate to sizes as small as 140 meters.)

"The importance of NEOs for science and safety has emphasized the need for accurate statistics of the population – but there is a problem. The discovery process for NEOs requires distinguishing between known and unknown targets, and then following up previously unknown targets to measure their orbits. The catalog of orbital elements of known NEOs, their size-frequency distribution, as well as the region of sky visited by telescopes, all serve as inputs for deriving debiased population models. But many NEOs are spotted and reported, but follow-up observations are not done.

"CfA astronomers Peter Vereš, Matthew Payne, Matthew Holman, Gareth Williams, Sonia Keys, and Ian Boardman (all are affiliated with the Minor Planet Center at the CfA) and a colleague have analyzed the NEO reports from 2013 to 2016; in this over 170,000 objects (including comets) were reported as likely candidates. By tracking down the list of candidates submitted to the minor Planet Center and using statistical tools, the scientists estimate that about 18 percent of all NEO candidates remain unconfirmed. They point to several reasons including delays in reporting the detection; the object is moving, and the scientists found that delaying the initial report from two to ten hours results in doubling the number of unconfirmed detections (the delay makes it more difficult for follow-ups to locate the moving source). Another issue is that unconfirmed NEOs tend to be much fainter and harder to follow up. The scientists conclude that the number of unconfirmed NEO candidates could be large, in the thousands, and emphasize the need for surveys to rapidly submit detection reports.

Comment: Even the small ones can create great damage. The Chicxulub was 5-9 kilometers in size and certainly we have found all of those by now.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2172233-nasa-outlines-its-plans-to-deal-with-a-lar...

"The chances of a large asteroid ending up on a collision course with Earth are slim, but NASA is making plans for how to detect and deflect such a catastrophe. Over the next decade, the space agency is planning to design and test ways to destroy an asteroid headed for our planet, or tug it off its path towards us.

"There are three techniques that could be used depending on the size of an incoming asteroid and the amount of warning time we have before it hits, he says. One is a gravity tractor, a heavy spacecraft that hovers near the asteroid so that its gravity can tug on the asteroid and pull it off its course.
'
“That could be enhanced if the spacecraft could collect mass, like a large boulder, from the surface to enhance gravitational attraction,” Lindley Johnson at NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office in Washington, DC said in a 20 June press conference. Another plan is to use a so-called kinetic impactor, deliberately crashing a spacecraft into the asteroid to change its speed and orbit. Johnson says this method will be tested in NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission scheduled to launch in the summer of 2021.

"A nuclear device could also be used against an incoming asteroid to either deflect it or break it up into pieces small enough that they would burn up in Earth’s atmosphere.

"In a report, NASA says they plan to develop mission plans and carry out flight demonstrations on harmless near-Earth objects for both the gravity tractor and kinetic impactor techniques.

NASA is also working with FEMA to prepare emergency responders to help warn people who may be in a place where an asteroid could hit, and to step in with emergency services if that happens.

"NASA works with ground-based telescopes around the world to detect and track near-Earth objects. That data is sent to the international asteroid warning network and the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs, which can warn countries of an impending asteroid impact.

“'With the internet, this information about a detection of an asteroid that could be a threat is going to be instantly out. It’s not something that can be hidden. But our processes and protocols are designed to verify and validate that information,” Johnson said."

Comment: Not science fiction and very important if we don't want to be dinosaurs.

dhw: The only unknown factor you are not prepared to discuss is your God’s purpose for producing humans, even though you insist that the whole of “creation” is related to that one purpose. You don’t and can’t “know” that either, so why do you bother to discuss it? Fortunately, however, there are now signs that you are coming down off your theistic fence!

You are looking for a purpose behind a purpose! God's purpose in producing humans does not have to have a God reason behind it. I see his purpose in how He engineered the evolution of humans from monkeys 23 million years ago. See yesterday's entry. You want me to see into God's mind. I can't! Again you are asking a humanizing question about God.

As an afterthought let me guide everyone to my entry about the appearance of a guided evolution for humans coming from monkey 23 million years ago. Our bipedalism makes us distinct from primates who aren't, and That is everybody but us!

The entry: Monday, April 17, 2017, 18:06

DAVID: I don't know why and neither do you. I presume to share in His consciousness and relate to Him through it. I've said this before.

dhw: The only unknown factor you are not prepared to discuss is your God’s purpose for producing humans, even though you insist that the whole of “creation” is related to that one purpose. You don’t and can’t “know” that either, so why do you bother to discuss it? Fortunately, however, there are now signs that you are coming down off your theistic fence!

You are looking for a purpose behind a purpose! God's purpose in producing humans does not have to have a God reason behind it. I see his purpose in how He engineered the evolution of humans from monkeys 23 million years ago. See yesterday's entry. You want me to see into God's mind. I can't! Again you are asking a humanizing question about God.

dhw: If it is reasonable to assume he is pleased with his creations, then why is it unreasonable to suggest that he created them in order to derive pleasure from them – and what is the difference between deriving pleasure and enjoying?
DAVID: Tony has covered this. I'm sure He has been pleased with his creations, but not with the bad results of granting free will.

dhw: You have not answered my question. If you are sure he has been pleased with his creations, why do you refuse to consider the possibility that he created them in the hope that they would please him, i.e. give him pleasure, i.e. enable him to enjoy them?

You want to keep humanizing Him. Fine. He might well be pleased and have pleasure. That is beside the points I make as to his purpose. I don't care about God's thinking leading up to his choice of purpose, because I cannot find any evidence to support a supposition about it.

And I've said this before: we don’t even know if God exists, how life originated, the true nature of the universe etc., but we discuss them endlessly. The only unknown factor you are not prepared to discuss is your God’s purpose for producing humans, even though you insist that the whole of “creation” is related to that one purpose. You don’t and can’t “know” that either, so why do you bother to discuss it? Fortunately, however, there are now signs that you are coming down off your theistic fence!

dhw: If it is reasonable to assume he is pleased with his creations, then why is it unreasonable to suggest that he created them in order to derive pleasure from them – and what is the difference between deriving pleasure and enjoying?
DAVID: Tony has covered this. I'm sure He has been pleased with his creations, but not with the bad results of granting free will.

You have not answered my question. If you are sure he has been pleased with his creations, why do you refuse to consider the possibility that he created them in the hope that they would please him, i.e. give him pleasure, i.e. enable him to enjoy them? (But see “Purpose and design”.)

DAVID: Please do not assign me with any firm beliefs about God's possible human characteristics. Those are discussion points only. As I look at reality I see purpose, and certainly that is a human attribute, but beyond that point I find no evidence of anything else. God's love is a religious proposition as an example.

dhw: But the only purpose you see is the production of humans, and then you refuse to ask why he would want to produce humans, which I would have expected to be a pretty important question!

I don't know why and neither do you. I presume to share in His consciousness and relate to Him through it. I've said this before.

dhw; If it is reasonable to assume he is pleased with his creations, then why is it unreasonable to suggest that he created them in order to derive pleasure from them – and what is the difference between deriving pleasure and enjoying?

Tony has covered this. I'm sure He has been pleased with his creations, but not with the bad results of granting free will.

But the only purpose you see is the production of humans, and then you refuse to ask why he would want to produce humans, which I would have expected to be a pretty important question!

dhw: Now please tell me why we should not argue that if God created the universe, life and humans, he had a reason for doing so and the reason may well be in terms perfectly comprehensible to ourselves, including those you yourself have suggested, e.g. loneliness, boredom, wanting a relationship, delighting in the pleasures of own work, enjoying watching us solve the problems he has set us. We can’t KNOW, of course, but then we can’t even KNOW if God exists. That is why we discuss these matters.

DAVID: As you stated, we cannot KNOW if any of this applies. Back to angels on the head of a pin. I view God as an eternal consciousness with no need for the companionship your list implies. It is reasonable to assume He is pleased with his creations. As a mind, a consciousness, He will be introspective. All conscious minds are.

If it is reasonable to assume he is pleased with his creations, then why is it unreasonable to suggest that he created them in order to derive pleasure from them – and what is the difference between deriving pleasure and enjoying?

dhw: Firstly, it is impossible to offer any answer to the question of God’s purposes in creating life and humans without attributing some recognizable human attribute to him; secondly you have agreed that God may well have certain human attributes; and thirdly you have admitted that you yourself believe he does have certain human attributes.

Please do not assign me with any firm beliefs about God's possible human characteristics. Those are discussion points only. As I look at reality I see purpose, and certainly that is a human attribute, but beyond that point I find no evidence of anything else. God's love is a religious proposition as an example.

dhw: Now please tell me why we should not argue that if God created the universe, life and humans, he had a reason for doing so and the reason may well be in terms perfectly comprehensible to ourselves, including those you yourself have suggested, e.g. loneliness, boredom, wanting a relationship, delighting in the pleasures of own work, enjoying watching us solve the problems he has set us. We can’t KNOW, of course, but then we can’t even KNOW if God exists. That is why we discuss these matters.

As you stated, we cannot KNOW if any of this applies. Back to angels on the head of a pin. I view God as an eternal consciousness with no need for the companionship your list implies. It is reasonable to assume He is pleased with his creations. As a mind, a consciousness, He will be introspective. All conscious minds are.

Firstly, it is impossible to offer any answer to the question of God’s purposes in creating life and humans without attributing some recognizable human attribute to him; secondly you have agreed that God may well have certain human attributes; and thirdly you have admitted that you yourself believe he does have certain human attributes. Now please tell me why we should not argue that if God created the universe, life and humans, he had a reason for doing so and the reason may well be in terms perfectly comprehensible to ourselves, including those you yourself have suggested, e.g. loneliness, boredom, wanting a relationship, delighting in the pleasures of own work, enjoying watching us solve the problems he has set us. We can’t KNOW, of course, but then we can’t even KNOW if God exists. That is why we discuss these matters.

dhw: What a coincidence! I thought your own response was the weird one! I really don’t think we need to be reminded about the dangers of the universe we live in, which range from asteroids careering round the universe – uncontrolled by your God, which leaves wide open the question of how much control he really has over the environment – to fatal diseases borne by divinely programmed or guided bacteria. Your God has apparently created all these and is now watching to see if we can solve the problems (but we mustn’t ask why because our answer might “humanize” him).

You can always ask why. Just don't put 'God is human in His thinking' in your propositions.

dhw: Please explain why you think this particular asteroid is necessary, and please tell us if you think your God is manipulating this particular asteroid or it is simply doing its own thing.

DAVID: What a weird response. Asteroids appear to be a natural part of the development of our solar system and probably exist in all solar systems. It was presented to show a specific aspect of the dangers in the universe we have to live with. It is certainly doing its own thing.

What a coincidence! I thought your own response was the weird one! I really don’t think we need to be reminded about the dangers of the universe we live in, which range from asteroids careering round the universe – uncontrolled by your God, which leaves wide open the question of how much control he really has over the environment – to fatal diseases borne by divinely programmed or guided bacteria. Your God has apparently created all these and is now watching to see if we can solve the problems (but we mustn’t ask why because our answer might “humanize” him).

DAVID’s comment: From the theistic point of view, God created the universe and it appears that asteroids were a necessary result. He also gave us the brains to solve the problem for our home planet.

dhw: Please explain why you think this particular asteroid is necessary, and please tell us if you think your God is manipulating this particular asteroid or it is simply doing its own thing.

What a weird response. Asteroids appear to be a natural part of the development of our solar system and probably exist in all solar systems. It was presented to show a specific aspect of the dangers in the universe we have to live with. It is certainly doing its own thing.