Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, February 02, 2017, 14:17 (2851 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID’S comment: […] I believe in a tough-love God who expects us to solve problems. Life in the Garden of Eden is easy but boring.
dhw: I like your final comment. It echoes my own hypothesis regarding God’s motive for creating life on Earth. Life in an eternal vacuum would have been easy but boring.
The remainder of your comment raises the question of what you mean by tough love and who you mean by “us”. […]
DAVID: ..."us" should be obvious. It is the human population of Earth.

So the human population matters to him, but later you say “We really don't know if He cares about individuals.” What is the human race if it’s not a collection of individuals? Frankly, if he doesn’t care about individuals, he may as well be a spectator or not there at all, but please tell us exactly what you think “matters” to him about humans.

DAVID: "Tough love" is the best way to parent. Ask my kids how I taught them to budget. We can try to explain why disease is allowed by God, but we also know viruses are used in genetic manipulations to advance evolution; tsunamis are earthquakes and without plate tectonics, there would be no life. My answer to you is there are tradeoffs that God had to allow. […] I view God as a serious operative who never looks for entertainment as a purpose. You are humanizing him constantly.

How can you discuss God’s intentions without humanizing him? Your God is a tough love parent, who expects us to solve problems like you taught your kids to budget – but this is not “humanizing” him? As for a God who you regard as being in total control but who “had to allow” tradeoffs, what forced him? Do you think he was incapable of inventing life and evolution without inflicting disease and untold suffering? Tough love parenting isn’t much help to a dead child. You view God as a “serious operative”. Why shouldn’t he be “serious” about relieving his boredom? The entertainment hypothesis is an explanation for the constantly changing patterns of evolutionary history, and you have admitted that it fits. The fact that you don’t believe it and that you have a different view of your God’s purpose is not much of an argument, especially when you avoid elaborating on that purpose, as in the next exchange:

dhw: Now please tell us what you think is his reason or motive for wanting to have a relationship with us.
DAVID: I can turn it around on you: if we have consciousness we can communicate with Him. I can ask you why did He give us consciousness if not to communicate?

By all means turn it around, but why don’t you answer my question first? You constantly inform me that you are the one looking for purpose, and so I ask you what you think is your God’s purpose in seeking a relationship with us (by which apparently you do not mean individuals but the whole human race). And may I ask what communication you have with your God? You keep telling us he is hidden, and you don’t know if he has thoughts and feelings like ours. Do you nevertheless talk to him and get a response?
In answer to your own question, what could provide greater variety of entertainment than an organism so advanced in its consciousness that it has almost unlimited potential powers of creation and destruction?

dhw: I don’t think any of us would dispute that harmful invaders damage the environment and destroy what we humans consider to be a healthy “balance” for ourselves and for wildlife. However, this has nothing to do with your hypothesis that God specially designed the nest, the migratory lifestyle, the camouflage etc. in order to “balance nature” in order to produce humans. And so the “invader” argument, and hence the “balance of nature” argument, is irrelevant to your anthropocentric interpretation of the whole of evolutionary history, where its meaning is nothing more than that life goes on.
DAVID: I work backward: humans are here, for no good requirement I can see when looking at the challenges to life in general. I accept that point as a given starting point to try to explain humans. The rest of my reasoning follows from that. I'm sorry it seems so strange to you.

I am simply pointing out that invaders disturbing the “balance of nature” have nothing to do with your God designing and destroying countless species in order to produce humans. The weaverbird and its nest, the duckbilled platypus and the camouflaged cuttlefish are also here “for no good requirement I can see when looking at the challenges to life in general”. They could have lived bacterially ever after. However, if you stand by your earlier agreement that your God may have designed an AUTONOMOUS inventive mechanism, and merely dabbled when it suited him to do so, we can drop both these illogical arguments and move on.