Natural Teleology: More Thomas Nagel (The limitations of science)

by dhw, Saturday, February 09, 2013, 11:49 (4303 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I clearly have more respect for anthropomorphic gods than you do. That is because I cannot imagine a self-aware God creating minds totally different from his own.-DAVID: I think I have discovered one of our 'misunderstanding' differences. I think my mind is a part of the universal intelligence (God) and as such is exactly the same as His. I am self-aware and so is HE. Only much smaller in capacity and with less intellectual power. -So our minds are not totally different from his ... one up for "worthless" anthropomorphic gods!-DAVID: But I am similar to concepts of God in that I can know the past but not the future. This is the background of why we have evolution. God has/had goals in mind and He had to use evolution to get there. We cannot truly know His personality which was fixed at His beginning. It just IS. We, on the other hand, develop a personality based on inheritance, life experiences, etc. we therefore all differ and have different expectations. My assumption is there never was nothing, an absolute void. Something cannot appear from a true void of nothingness. God is a necessary being, from the beginning, whenever that was. I am made in the image of God in my brain's consciousness. Here the Bible is right on.-You say God's personality was fixed at his beginning, but according to you he had no beginning. And the fact that we cannot truly know his personality doesn't mean he hasn't got one, or that it does not share the characteristics of his creations. And why should whatever personality he has be fixed? Maybe his basic characteristics are, in the same way that heredity fixes many of ours, but if he doesn't know the future, then he's going to learn something, and learning something automatically involves movement of some kind. So why assume that he had goals in mind, did all this planning, engaged in all this detailed scientific analysis and execution, and yet had no human-like reasons for doing so (e.g. boredom, entertainment, curiosity, education) and himself underwent no development? If God exists, it makes perfect sense to me that our consciousness mirrors his, but self-awareness requires a self to be aware of, and so it also makes perfect sense to me that the attributes of the creature mirror the attributes of the creator. Perhaps rather than call it an anthropomorphic view of God, we should call it a deomorphic view of man.
 
I agree, and have always agreed, that nothing can come of nothing. I don't know why that makes God a necessary being. Your argument that life is too complex to have assembled itself by chance is fine with me, but that has no bearing on the "nothing" argument. If eternal, unselfconscious energy as "first cause" did come up with the magic formula by sheer luck or by "intelligent" cell-like experimentation, you wouldn't need God. I think you should stick to your complexity argument!