Reading God\'s mind (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Thursday, December 20, 2012, 11:50 (4145 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 1) If God's intention in creating life was to create humans, what do you think was his intention in creating humans?
2) If the Big Bang was the beginning of our universe, but God is an eternal, self-aware energy, what do you think he would have been doing with himself in the eternity before he organized the Big Bang?-DAVID: Taking (2) first as the easiest: He has been around for an eternity. There have been other universes and probably different results. We can only know this attempt. The others were not failures, just different, but of course, as I am here and now, I can have no idea of what the other attempts were like.-This reinforces the argument that first cause energy ... whether it is your fully self-aware variety, the not so conscious variety, or even the atheistic totally non-conscious variety, has had an eternity to chuck itself around and come up with an infinity of different combinations.
 
DAVID: As for (1) why shouldn't a UI want company? This is where I don't trust the standard religious thought that God loves u, that is why He created us, gave us life, free will and that is certainly more entertaining than glowing stars and rocky planets and nothing else. I don't know if 'entertaining' is the right word. 'Interesting' might be better, perhaps 'stimulating' as He watches us. As I've noted in the past, it is not right to give God personal attributes. In the circumstance we live in, we cannot really know His personality and should avoid anthropomorphism. So, I really do not understand God's mind, since I will not attempt to give Him a personality.
But I do see His intention for us to be here. None of the existing theories of evolution demand our appearance. Gould's contingency theory that we are totally an accident again creates the 'enormous odds' objection.-None of the existing theories of evolution demand the dodo. But for my own sly purposes, this answer will do, tentative though it is. And I like your list of adjectives: 'entertaining', 'interesting', stimulating', and "as He watches us" is fine with me too. (All of this assuming that he exists in the first place.) Tony uses adjectives like 'bored' and 'lonely', which fit in nicely. I can even go along with our being here intentionally. Here's the "sly" bit: a god who wanted company could have created life without knowing where it was leading, and then gradually increased its complexity as he found out what he could and couldn't do, finishing up (so far) with us. No preplanning of humans from the very start. Alternatively, he could have set up the mechanism for evolution, with its almost unlimited potential for development, and watched where it led. Entertaining, interesting, stimulating, but not planned from the beginning. He could still be watching, or he could have just sloped off to make himself another universe while his little toy went on developing to the potential he had given it. Three alternatives to the anthropocentric theory of evolution, and we haven't even mentioned atheism.
 
Your dislike of imposing attributes on God (e.g. that he loves us) raises another important question. If you don't believe in any of these religious conventions, and you are open-minded about whether or not there is an afterlife, and you think God may have created us and is watching us for company, entertainment, interest or stimulation, and he keeps himself hidden from us, he might as well not be there. So why does God's existence matter to you? 
 
For Tony and BBella, there is the possibility of a larger purpose of which we are ignorant, though for BBella it seems to be linked to a perfect fulfilment of human potential ... maybe in some kind of earthly (heavenly?) paradise. I'm surprised that Tony himself hasn't mentioned the kingdom of heaven, since the bible contains so many references to it (as well as to hell). I find it hard to believe that this fourth possibility does not have something to do with humans in an afterlife, since without that it can't be of any relevance to us personally, let alone to the zillions of humans who have existed before us. BBella's thoughts on this seem fluid, but perhaps Tony you could at least tell us your own beliefs concerning an afterlife and what it might entail.
 
My apologies if this is developing into a sort of classroom exercise, but now that I've started on this path, it might be worth seeing where it leads (as God might have said when he stuck together his first lego-DNA).