Watching asteroids; possible damage (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, March 04, 2017, 23:55 (2822 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: What I have clearly said is God has chosen to use evolutionary methods for the universe, for the Earth and for life. That does not indicate He has any limits. Where I have definitely suggested limits are the asteroids as they may be necessary.

dhw: If in order to produce humans he had to use the roundabout method you impose on him and couldn’t do direct creation, he was limited.

DAVID: I'm sorry I've confused you. My stance is expressed clearly above. Your no limitation approach might never have arrived at humans.

Dhw: My theistic approach does not involve God having limitations or having no limitations, and allows for him dabbling. It focuses on the actual history of evolution and tries to extrapolate God’s possible intentions.

Dhw: Your objection to this reverts to:
DAVID: And you are humanizing Him again. I don't know He needed an entertaining show.
dhw: I did not say that he needed it but that he wanted it, just as you say he wanted to create humans. It is impossible to discuss your God’s intentions without humanizing him, as you have discovered in your own attempts to explain why he wanted to produce humans. But of course we don’t “know”. We are simply trying to find an explanation that fits the history of life, and your own makes no sense to you unless you impose limitations on your God’s powers.

DAVID: There is a giant difference. We don't know why He wanted humans. That seems to be His purpose and as a person like no other person it does not make Him human. Wanting entertainment is human. And finally I have no idea whether He is limited. I make perfect sense to me, point after point.

dhw: Nobody is claiming that God is human, but that does not mean we can't have any attributes in common with him. If he exists, it is not unreasonable to ask why he might have created the universe. Your insistence that he did so in order to produce human beings leads you to contradiction after contradiction, which I will list once more if you cannot remember them all. But for now, let me ask you a personal question: since you are not prepared to ask why God wanted to create humans (your own answers having led to highly confusing hypotheses), and since you believe it possible that he doesn’t even care what happens to individual humans, why is it so important for you to establish that he planned the universe and the whole of life for the sake of humans, as opposed to their being perhaps the result of his experiments or of an afterthought?

It is not important to me that God created humans. To imply an importance to my investigations over the years suggests a motive I did not have. I was a superficial agnostic after medical school. That is, I just didn't know or care. Then when I started to follow the development of the standard model of particles and the theories of cosmology, I realized there had to be a power behind it. I had the same non-committal feeling about Darwin's theory. After my first book the editor suggested I write about Science and evolution based on what I told him about my thought. He suggested I take critical look at Darwin' theory, and I quickly discovered it was a house of cards. Thus the first science vs. religion book.

Our discussions and your critical observations have made me defend my choices. I appreciate the debate on your part and my arrival at current conclusions. What you have seen is a stream of consciousness as I have responded to you, while I wander/wonder all over the place. I now am sure of my thought as follows: God uses evolution as a process, producing a universe in a single event which then evolved. He had the Earth appear in its special form with plate tectonics, etc., and finally He started life which then evolved to humans, an obvious desired end point. And the processes which cause life are too complex for a chance development In that In those thoughts I am firmly certain. What is not certain is whether He pre-programmed each of these evolutions. If He did then he is really all-powerful per the Bible. If on the other hand He had to dabble, then He is limited. No one knows which is correct, and nothing in the known historical record can tell us. Either way, all powerful or semi-powerful, He is in tight control of those processes. He certainly could have given organisms some degree of inventiveness, and then corrected what went off the rails. We have no evidence of any modifications beyond the minor adaptations that organisms can accomplish. Anything beyond what I have stated is pure guess work until we understand speciation, if we ever can.