Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 18, 2017, 12:34 (2806 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: It’s an amazing concept: a God who creates with no purpose other than to observe, and who might have absolutely no feelings whatsoever. It would mean that prior to his invention of life, he had had no personal experience of enjoyment, love, boredom, curiosity, sympathy, empathy, the good, the bad and the ugly. It took living forms to invent them. If that were true, I would rate your God as infinitely superior to us in the sciences and in sheer mental and physical power, and infinitely inferior to us and some of our fellow animals in every other conceivable way. I’m pleased to hear that you are now willing to accept the possible “humanization” of your God by agreeing that he may have attributes similar to our own. We are making progress.

DAVID: Not much progress. If God is all alone, to whom does He relate to have all the emotional feelings you ascribe to Him? He might have created humans so that we could relate to him so He could observe our feelings and find out what emotions are like. That could be it. He's lonely and needed us to relate to!

Thank you for a brilliant answer. We are making huge progress! Let us substitute your humanized “lonely” for my humanized “bored”, if that is what you prefer. It gives us a very logical reason for his creating life. And indeed one can well imagine him designing all sorts of creatures, or creating a mechanism which would do its own designing, so that he could find some diversion to relieve the burden of his loneliness. He might possibly have wanted to create a mind like his own, and experimented. Or he might possibly have had the idea of designing a mind like his own during the course of his experiments. (I link experimentation to dabbling.) Or he might have been delighted to find that the mechanism he had designed to do its own designing actually came up with a mind like his own without him dabbling. All of these hypotheses fit in perfectly, not only with the history of life on Earth but also with the hypothesis that God may have been lonely and required some relief from his loneliness. Wouldn’t you say they are just as likely as your God saying to himself at the very beginning: “I’ll relieve my loneliness by creating humans that I can relate to, but first I shall have to design the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle, the fly’s compound eye because…” either for the next 3.X billion years he is incapable of getting what he wants, or he just wants to do it that way for reasons you and I can’t even guess at, because such a decision makes no sense to either of us?