Watching asteroids; possible damage (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, March 02, 2017, 13:20 (2609 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If I'm convinced that He wanted to produce humans, it all makes sense to me. That He used evolutionary processes is obvious to me. Which means apparently He had to. He began the universe which then evolved. He created life which then evolved. That is a pattern for God's methods. He chose them because He couldn't do direct creation as the Bible suggests in Genesis. That is a reasonable thought.
dhw: […] According to you, he either preprogrammed or dabbled (directly created) every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of evolution, until at last he could dabble the human brain. This originally did not make sense to you, but now you have hit on the explanation: suddenly, he who until just a few days ago was always in tight control (one of your reasons for rejecting the concept of the autonomous IM has always been that your God would NOT sacrifice his tight control) is forced to design all of this because owing to circumstances which he created but which are beyond his control, he is simply incapable of doing what he set out to do, i.e. dabble the human brain, until the year X. And it was his choice to make himself incapable of doing it any other way.
DAVID: You extrapolate my suppositions beyond all recognition, which is fun in a debate but does not truly explore the intent of my thinking which is expressed above. I've never changed as you imply. I have always recognized the God might have limits, but He always uses an evolutionary process and keeps as tight control as He can. I don't know that He chose to be incapable; your phrase came from what thought? He may simply could not do it any other way and is not as all powerful as the Bible proposes.

So why did you say he “chose” the method, if it was forced on him by the laws he himself had created? Either he chose it or he didn’t choose it.

However, since you and I believe that evolution happened, i.e. life began with comparatively simple forms and evolved into forms that are more complex, it is fair enough to assume from a theistic viewpoint that God did choose that method. It is not fair enough to assume that right from the start he was forced by the laws he himself created to design millions of non-human organisms, a system of indiscriminate natural disasters and diseases, and a continual succession of comings and goings before he was finally able to get what he wanted with a dabble, which he couldn’t have done earlier. All of these convolutions spring from your one basic premise that he started out with the purpose of producing humans. If you now think that your God, who created the universe and life from scratch, can be that limited, why can’t you accept that there is an alternative possibility: namely, that he actually got precisely what he wanted in the way he wanted it, i.e. the ever changing and unpredictable spectacle of life’s history as we know it, maybe with dabbled humans as the most recent and most interesting part of the show?