Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, February 12, 2017, 09:08 (2841 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Wanting to produce humans, wanting a relationship, and wanting us to solve problems are put forward by you as your God’s purposes, but you are convinced that his purposes do not include any benefit to himself. I really don’t know why you should believe that your God would go to all that trouble if he didn’t get SOMETHING out of it for himself, but that is part of the great muddle: you keep telling me that God is all-purposeful, and you are the one who sees purpose everywhere, but you just cannot (or do not want to) imagine that your God has any purpose beyond creating you and setting you problems.
DAVID: If we cannot approach God as a person, we cannot know His personal motives for Himself. Again you are humanizing Him.

Yet again “we cannot know”. Of course we can’t. You have actually agreed that we only theorize about things we don’t know and, in this case, cannot know. Hence the history of philosophy. At one moment you exhort me to look for purpose, and the next you exhort me to stop looking for purpose. It is impossible to look for purpose without “humanizing”, and as I have said before, it is just as presumptuous to assume that he has no human attributes as to assume that he has none. Even insisting that he has a purpose is “humanizing” him, and guessing that his purpose was to produce us so that we could solve problems and have a tough-love relationship with him is also “human”. So why shouldn’t we ask why he wants us to solve the problems? If he took all the trouble to create life, do you not think it feasible that he might also watch the life he had created and watch us trying to solve the problems? Why are you so afraid of following up the implications of your own humanizing speculations?