The immensity of the universe (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Tuesday, January 26, 2016, 18:22 (3222 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The language is becoming interesting: the elements could “work toward life”? I thought your God planned and did all the work.
DAVID: I used the word 'work' in the sense of a progressive working process. -In which case perhaps you mean it's your God who worked towards life. But the elements doing it themselves fits in rather nicely with a possible atheistic pansychist approach.
 
dhw: “The proper planet appeared”? I thought your God specially planned and created it.
DAVID: It is just as possible that His evolving universe developed the Earth due to His process or He carefully directed the production of an Earth. Either is possible as I view it.-Anyone who believes in cosmic as well as biological evolution will agree that the “evolving universe developed the Earth”, since the Earth exists. But if your God did not carefully direct the production, it's difficult to find any need for him at all. See below.-dhw: In my summary, I indicated other factors that your God might have left to chance (now in bold). So just to clarify again: are you now eliminating the chance alternatives and saying: 1) God organized (and presumably still organizes) all the billions of solar systems and all the colossal explosions of giant stars? And 2) this was his method of creating a relatively tiny collection of “life-giving elements” which he directed (not sure about the timing here) to land on a specially created Earth? And 3) once he'd prepared Earth, he assembled these products of millions of explosions into the first minute cells, which he preprogrammed (apart from when he dabbled) to produce the weaverbird's nest and the rest of evolutionary history, with us the final goal? Sorry about the interrogation, but as you know, I do like a bit of clarity!
DAVID: As I noted above. He either created a process which gave the proper final results, or He carefully directed every desired result. Either works for me. He was always in control.-Since no one can read your God's mind, how does anyone know what are the “proper final results”? But I quite like the idea of your God creating a process and NOT carefully directing every desired result, since it fits in perfectly with the hypothesis that he created an autonomous inventive intelligence that produced the vast higgledy-piggledy history of evolution. Similarly, as far as the cosmos is concerned, your comment allows for him to have set off the whole “process” of solar systems and individual stars appearing and disappearing, and to have left it entirely to chance to put all the elements together, since he knew that if he created an infinite number of such systems, eventually one of them would give “the proper final results”. That also fits in perfectly with atheism: given an infinite number of combinations, eventually you are bound to get life and evolution. But then you don't have to call it the proper or desired result. Just the result we have.