Watching asteroids; possible damage (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 15, 2017, 13:46 (2599 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I question such assumptions/presumptions as your God’s original purpose being to create humans, that he does not experiment, that he does not contain one smidgen of evil, that he is always in tight control (except when he isn’t in tight control),
DAVID: He may well be in tight control.
And he may well not be, as you make clear in your two conflicting hypotheses.

dhw: ...that organisms are incapable of working out their own lifestyle and natural wonders, and that they were all designed by your God for the purpose of keeping life going until he could dabble humans.
DAVID: It may not require dabbling.
But it may, as you make clear in your two conflicting hypotheses.

DAVID: Based on historical evidence I look for His purpose only, not His personal thinking or personal desires.
dhw: I don’t see how you can separate purpose from personal thinking,
DAVID: One can certainly have pure purpose as the only thought without some type of personal gratification.

Personal gratification is one form of personal thinking. The desire for a relationship (one of your theories) is another. The desire to watch humans solve problems God himself can’t solve (one of your theories) is another. If you can insist that God’s purpose (which we cannot know) was to produce humans, I don’t know why we shouldn’t ask why he wanted to produce humans. (See my comment under “ruminations”).

DAVID: Evolution can be His choice and He guides it. Of course evolution implies He might be limited , but if it is His method of choice and He guides it, then he is not limited. I'm simply describing the various possibilities. It is why I introduced dabbling vs. pre-planning.

I am delighted that you are now describing your two (hardly various) contradictory possibilities, and that you recognize that we cannot know which of them is correct. Here once more are some alternatives: God did not set out to produce humans, and the vast variety of life forms was produced for its own sake – either by his design or through an autonomous (perhaps God-given) mechanism that created its own designs. (You need not ask why God would want to produce a variety of life forms.) Humans may have been an afterthought, as evolution unfolded, or he may have had some vague idea of producing a consciousness like his own but didn’t know how until some 3.X billion years into the process (maybe he kept on experimenting), or the autonomous inventive mechanism (perhaps God-given) naturally made the leap from the more simple ape brain to the more complex human brain.

Please tell me (1) where these alternative hypotheses (as unproven as your own) fail to match evolutionary history, and (2) why they are not just as convincing as yours.

dhw: ...your “balance of nature” means nothing more than that life goes on – regardless of what form it takes.
DAVID: Will you ever accept the point that the balance supplies the necessary energy for life to continue, and is required?

It is nature that supplies the energy, and the balance at any particular time is formed by whichever organisms are best able to exploit the energy provided. The respective and ever changing balance is the result, not the supplier. I do of course accept that energy is required for life to continue, but that applies with or without humans, and so it has nothing to do with your claim that God designed every life form etc. to keep life going until humans arrived, unless you insist that God was incapable of producing humans until he had designed the weaverbird’s nest, the frog’s tongue, and the fly’s compound eye.