Purpose and design (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, April 20, 2017, 13:04 (2525 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: Attributing human like features to God doesn't miss the mark UNLESS you try to a) ignore the bits you don't like, or b) insist that God should do things or think about things our way (which would be incredibly dumb because our ways normally stink).DHW is fond of doing both when the mood strikes and he is drinking his theist tea, but mainly I think he just does it to tweak David's beard, or mine.

I really ought to leave this discussion to you and David, but this particular passage draws me in! Firstly, although I appreciate the irony of the tone, I’d just like to point out that in my view our ways do not “normally” stink. My experience of human nature is that there is a genuine balance between perfume and stink. I see just as many acts of love, charity, kindness, empathy as I do of hate, egotism, meanness and indifference. I also see that in many cases, the positive requires the negative, but that does not mean the negative is excluded from God's possible nature. Secondly, in considering that nature, I certainly do not ignore the bits I don’t like, and I have never insisted that he should think as we do. “Drinking my theist tea” is inevitable if I am to discuss the nature – as opposed to the actual existence – of God, but it is not just a beard-tweaking exercise. God may exist, and if he does, I consider his nature to be a subject of major importance to us all! But I have no way of knowing what he is like beyond extrapolations from what he has created and from the statements of my fellow humans. In both cases, I find myself confronted with the same mixture of attributes as above. And so, as regards both the existence and the nature of a possible God, I find myself unable to form any belief, which is why I tend to offer the counter-argument to anyone who does have a fixed belief.


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