A Scientists Approach to Creation (Origins)

by dhw, Sunday, January 20, 2013, 19:55 (4323 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Chance ends the debate. The universe is then a vast impersonal combination of mindless matter and energy, there is no purpose, and we are on our own.
Nuff said?-DAVD: Chance does not end the debate because of its open ended problems: Where did anything come from? How did life start? The complicated first cells are astronomically impossible to imagine as due to chance. The much simpler answer is there is a Designer.-Round we go! "Where did anything come from?" The same answer for both theist and atheist: first cause energy (self-aware for the theist, mindless for the atheist). How life started is the subject of the choice here! For reasons why chance is the simpler of two equally unbelievable theories, see the second half of my post of 18 January at 18.30.
 
dhw: Re anthropomorphizing the First Cause: the moment you attribute purpose to his actions (as you have done with your insistence that man was the planned end product), you are anthropomorphizing him. And once you go down that line, I don't think it is humanly possible to stop yourself from wondering what that purpose might be.-DAVID: By looking at the process He presents to us and its outcome, I can reach conclusions that evolution had a purpose. An end point of a human with consciousness is highly improbable and implies purpose. I am totally content with that, without knowing what God is thinking. God is unknowable; we are trapped with that knowledge and we can go no further.-Paradoxically, you go one stage further than me, although I go one stage further than you! I look at the process, at life, at the earth, at the universe: stars come and go; evolution happened, billions of species came and went; nothing is permanent. Each light flickers an instant, then it dies, as it has done before we came, and as it will do when we are gone. I conclude that whether God exists or not is unknowable, and I am trapped with that knowledge. You think you can go further. So does Tony. So do George and Dawkins. And so the paradox is that in our approach to the unknowable, you go one stage further than me with your conclusion, but I go one stage further than you with my speculation, because I do not stop at the unknowable. As Tony so rightly says, I am stubborn!