Watching asteroids; possible damage (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 08, 2017, 11:48 (2818 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your comments shift from methods to possible intentions. I think we've agreed God uses evolutionary processes. You have God's possible intentions wandering all over the place, as if He were a wandering human, not sure how to proceed. He is not. I view Him as absolutely purposeful. In my view He started this universe to create humans as His prime purpose.

I am painfully aware of your view regarding God’s prime purpose. I have proposed two possible intentions/purposes: 1) to produce a spectacle; 2) to produce humans (though I would also like to know his purpose in doing so). Hardly “all over the place”. He knows exactly how to proceed for the spectacle hypothesis (which allows for dabbling anyway). For the production of humans, I offer experimentation (limitation of knowledge) in place of your making him incapable of producing them (limitation of powers) without first designing every life form, lifestyle and natural wonder until he could dabble with the pre-human brain, or pre-humans could switch on his 3.8-billion-year-old programme for brain enlargement.

DAVID: Humans had to be planned from the beginning. They are here against all odds, not required by nature's stresses; nothing more is required to recognize the reason I accept the premise.
dhw: ALL life is here against all odds, and the survival of bacteria shows that NO multicellular forms of life were required by nature’s stresses. You continue to wander around all over the place (your words, not mine) because you resolutely refuse to look at the problem in any way other than humans being planned from the beginning, and everything else being a means to that end. And you still won’t tell me why this belief is so important to you that you are unable to consider any alternative explanations of life's history.
DAVID: My view covered above in my new remarks today. The belief makes perfect sense to me. To use your own words: "ALL life is here against all odds", but humans are a very special form of life with a consciousness that is so unusual in its magnitude of attributes, we cannot explain it. During the during the past 8-10 million years of human evolution, haven't you noticed that nothing else really evolved? Some species disappeared, but apes and monkeys stayed the same. We are looking at God's final drive to produce H. sapiens, the end of His process. We are looking at my developed faith against your groundless applying of human motives to God's activities.

I have never disputed the extraordinary nature of human consciousness. The question is why, if humans were God’s prime purpose, he first had to design every other life form, lifestyle and natural wonder. Your only counter to my proposals, both of which provide a perfectly logical explanation for the higgledy-piggledy evolutionary bush, is to reiterate your opinion. I don’t know why you call your faith in your evolutionary scenario “developed” when you admit that you wander all over the place in trying to justify it, and I don’t know why, if God is “absolutely purposeful”, you consider it wrong to ask what his purpose for producing humans might be. (I see no difference between purpose, intention and motive.) And why is it less purposeful to create a spectacle, or to experiment (the alternatives I offered above), than to produce human beings by designing millions of other life forms, styles and natural wonders that have no link to the production of humans?