particles and connections (General)

by dhw, Friday, February 17, 2017, 14:06 (2835 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: …what models – and in my view muddles – all your thinking is your view that your God geared every single species, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct throughout the history of evolution to their production (via the nebulous balance of nature, which simply means life goes on).
DAVID: Balance of nature is the only way evolution continued, providing life with the energy it needed to live and evolve under His direction. Sorry you don't see that. Not simple!

Life requires energy. The balance of nature changes according to how much energy is available to each species. You have agreed that all it means is life goes on. Nothing to do with your God designing millions of life forms and styles and wonders in order to produce humans.

dhw: And that hypothesis is modelled (muddled) by your personal image of your God, who knew exactly what he was doing right from the start and always remains in tight control.
DAVID: Why shouldn't He have a complete plan from the beginning?

A complete plan for what? The problem with your hypothesis is the nature of your plan: you insist that your God, who is always in tight control, geared everything right from the beginning to the production of humans, which leads you to have him designing nests and flight paths and parasites and frogs' tongues and fishy camouflage etc. in order to keep life going before he can dabble with the brains of humans - and his ability to dabble makes even you wonder why he couldn't have produced us more directly. It just doesn't make sense.

dhw: I am certainly not limited to the image you have created of a tough love God who is always in total control but could only find one way to create life, wants a relationship with us but hides from us and has nothing in common with us, does not contain one “smidgen” of evil and yet is creator of all that is, and watches us with interest but definitely did not create us in order to watch us with interest.
DAVID: Surprise. I see nothing wrong with your analysis of my position.

Then I am surprised you cannot see that it is riddled with contradictions.

DAVID: Because the Earth He created is a dangerous place. It seems to be true that He could not do it any other way.
dhw: It seems to you to be true, because you have now decided that although your God created the whole universe and is always in tight control, his powers are limited.
DAVID: Limitations may be possible. There are the dangers to us.

The dangers are all too apparent. You are suggesting that your God, who created everything from scratch and does not have a smidgen of evil in him, created disease and every type of natural disaster because he had no choice. And now he watches with interest to see if we humans can solve the problems he couldn’t solve.