Ruminations on multiverses; if they are evil (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 19, 2017, 11:14 (2805 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: 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?
DAVID: I'm glad you like my thoughts about loneliness. It does offer a different approach about God's possible personality. If He is all-knowing, then this discussion is a n on-starter. He knows all about emotions and relationships without experiencing them. But since I try not to use Biblical impressions of God, He may have to experience relating to us, His creations.

I do like this approach, and I think it is one element of so-called process theology: that God is not immutable and all-knowing but is involved, like ourselves, in a process of “becoming”. In other words, he learns and experiences as he goes along. Needless to say, you can apply this to evolution – he learns as he goes along (or, if my autonomous inventive mechanism hypothesis is correct, he learns as it goes along).

DAVID: However, you finished your reasonable paragraph with a note about life's diversity and the length of time for evolution of humans with total misunderstanding, as usual.
We do not know if God is limited in any way in explaining the length of time for human evolution. If He is control of the rate of evolution, as I believe, then the rapid appearance of life earlier on Earth and the sudden appearance of the Cambrian Explosion, tells us He can move quickly when He wants to. Look at how quickly human development occurred in the past eight million years. As for the diversity, it is balance of nature/energy supply, nothing more. As for making no sense, I like my sensible answers to the questions.

There is no misunderstanding, unless you are backtracking on your original agreement with me, which I have now quoted several times, that it does not make sense if an all-powerful God sets out with the intention of producing humans, but first produces the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle (plus all the other natural wonders extant and extinct) in order to keep life going until humans appear. The only explanation you could offer was that your God might be limited, i.e. not all-powerful. I have offered alternatives to your two hypotheses, and you have agreed they fit in with the history of life as we know it.

There is no disagreement between us on the proposal that diversity is the result of the changing balance of nature, as caused by the changing energy supply. We have agreed that this has nothing whatsoever to do with humans being the “endpoint” of evolution.