Purpose and design (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, April 24, 2017, 14:52 (2768 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Our consciousness certainly relates to His. Obviously, neither are blank. I'm sure both are extremely active.
dhw: So what aspects of our consciousness do you think might be “related” to his?
DAVID: You and I are consciously discussing God. Isn't that a relationship to Him? I have my own form of praying to Him. I get comfort from my belief in Him and the way it explains the mysteries of existence to me. As for your comments above the break, what an extreme from of humanizing God by offering to describe Him as bored. God is pure purpose, pure intent. It is not all coming and going. It is evolving processes ending in purposeful results. Once you accept purpose as primary, all of the considerations you think of as illogical fall into place.

We can consciously discuss fairies at the bottom of the garden, but it hardly constitutes a relationship to them. If God exists, of course purpose is primary, but what in heaven’s name is “pure purpose, pure intent”? The term is meaningless. Our disagreement is over what we think that purpose is. You insist it was the production of humans. That is not “pure purpose, pure intent” – that is a specifically defined purpose. And even if your rigidly dogmatic anthropocentrism were true (which of course we cannot “know”, any more than we can “know” that God exists), that in itself is not primary because if God is purposeful, there must have been a purpose in producing humans. I have suggested several purposeful hypotheses to fit in with different scenarios, all of which you have agreed “fall into place”. What has never fallen into place is your insistence that every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder was related to the production of humans.

Tony: Self-awareness, introspection, abstract reasoning ability, a sense of time, place, and purpose, the drive to create, emotional depth, etc.
DAVID: I can accept this statement, even the 'emotional depth' in a general non-specific way.

Just as you cannot have non-specific purpose, you cannot have non-specific “emotion”. If your God is capable of emotion, he is capable of boredom, interest, love, hate and any other feeling we humans are capable of. I do not ask for belief in such a hypothesis, but I do expect rational argument instead of hollow terminology or groundlessly authoritative statements. Study his works and extrapolate possibilities. That is all we can do. But you refuse to do it, as you have now explicitly acknowledged:
dhw: By studying God, I understand trying to work out his nature and his purpose. You do not want to discuss his nature because it is unknowable and one must not humanize, and you only want to talk about purpose if it is the one and only purpose you believe in, which is to produce humans.
DAVID: Exactly.

In order to cope with things you don’t understand,
‘Tis recommended you stick your head in the sand.
(New Texan proverb)