Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 22, 2017, 13:33 (2831 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: No twisting. Your own statements raise two issues. Firstly, you claim that your God was forced (presumably by the laws of Nature which he had created, since he created everything) to create diseases and natural disasters in order to produce humans. And now he watches to see if humans can solve the problems that he couldn’t solve! None of that makes sense.
DAVID: I'm not sure where your analysis comes from. Earth with plate tectonics supports life. Volcanoes and earthquakes are necessary byproducts of that arrangement. God should disallow those side effects? Like love and marriage, they are inextricably tied together. You want Him to step in and protect us. you sound like a priest or rabbi.

No, I don’t want him to step in and protect us. I am simply trying to follow the logic by which your God, who is always in tight control and created out of himself the whole universe and everything in it, now turns out to be strictly limited by the laws he himself created, has no choice other than a method that he knows will cause untold suffering, but also expects us inferior beings to solve the problems he can’t solve.

dhw:According to you, he didn’t “allow” the results but he had no choice – and he doesn’t care. Quite apart from the fact that not caring is every bit as “humanizing” as caring, I would like to know what you would call a being who inflicts suffering and doesn’t care.
DAVID: I don't know that He doesn't care. I don't remember ever saying that.

I gave you the quote: Saturday 4 February at 22.44: “I don’t believe God has any smidgen of evil in himself. Evil is the result of what he has created: the physical forces of Earth, the evil in freedom-of-choice imperfect humans. That he allowed the results means He does not care if they happen. He has given us the power to try and solve these problems, and we are doing just that.” (My bold) It’s difficult to hold a discussion if you dissociate yourself from your own statements.

DAVID: Guess what? It doesn't make sense to me either, but He did not directly create humans. He used an evolutionary process of living organisms, after using an evolutionary process to create the universe and a very special Earth.
dhw: It doesn’t make sense to you, but that’s what happened, so he either wanted or had to do it in a way that makes no sense to you. You refuse to consider the possibility that in devising the evolutionary process he might have had perfectly understandable intentions different from those that you impose on him.
DAVID: He might have other purposes. We don't see any obvious ones, but remember I start from the conclusion He wanted humans, and that is history.

Perhaps one should not start with a conclusion, especially when the conclusion leads to a scenario which even you agree makes non-sense of the whole higgledy-piggledy process. God wanting humans is not history. The fact that humans arrived, that the duckbilled platypus arrived, and that 99% of species arrived and departed is history. God’s intentions (if he exists) are speculation.

DAVID: We are not studying human history. We are studying God's creations to infer intentions, a very different process of analysis…
Exactly. And you have agreed that your inferences do not make sense.

DAVID: God is only developing an energy-supplying balance of nature to allow for billions of years of evolution. So simple to see.
Life will always require energy. THAT is simple to see. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the claim that your God had to design every evolutionary twiddly bit in order to keep life going until he could dabble with the pre-human brain or until his 3.X-billion-year-old human brain programme could switch itself on.

DAVID: It is obvious you cannot get rid of God in your own thinking with your own God-lite IM proposal. Chance or design (not God-lite) is all there can be.
dhw: Of course I can’t get rid of God. I am an agnostic. I can neither believe nor disbelieve. But it is not God-lite to disagree with your personal reading of your God’s mind, especially when that reading results in a scenario which does not make sense even to you and can only be explained by your claim that he must have wanted or been forced to do it your way. Maybe your way is NOT the correct reading of his mind.

DAVID: My way may not be correct. I admit that.
Thank you.

DAVID: Your posture on the fence requires you to use God-lite constantly. Obvious. There is only chance or design; the latter requires a designer! I view you as stuck in limbo.

I know you love your new coinage “God-lite”, but God creating a mechanism that would provide an ever changing spectacle of life forms (while allowing him to dabble) is not “God-lite”. It merely offers an alternative to your own avowedly non-sensical interpretation of your God’s evolutionary intentions and methods, and I’m afraid my being stuck in limbo does not endow your scenario with the sense that is so patently missing.