Purpose and design (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, April 27, 2017, 12:09 (2765 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

DAVID: I don't expect you to agree. Everything we see is designed to produce life which resulted in humans. The result speaks for itself.
dhw: It also resulted in dinosaurs, which went extinct, and in the duckbilled platypus, which is still here, and in countless other life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders extinct and extant. If the result spoke for itself, there would be no disagreement.
TONY: You ever wonder if some things, like the duckbilled platypus, are here to simply remind us how ignorant we are? I mean, it defies all classifications and yet we still cling to our classifications as if they actually have some meaning.

Our classifications, like all language, are just symbols to try and help us understand and communicate. And like all language they are sometimes inadequate.

DHW: I know you have very definite views yourself on God’s purposes, but I’m sure you will agree that everything you have written - especially in relation to unpredictability or there being no real reason for him to make predictions - fits in perfectly with the hypothesis (and it's ONLY a hypothesis) that your God, if he exists, created life to relieve the boredom of eternal introspection.
TONY: According to my belief system, he didn't tinker or experiment with consciousness because his very, very first creation WAS as conscious creature: his own son. Further, my belief system also states that he started his remaining creative works in an immaterial (spirit) plane of existence. Matter came much later to the scene, long after the creative process started. It could be that, in a sense, his son was formed much as a simple organism is, some form of energetic meiosis or mitosis, followed by a very long period of growth before creation started. Which, ironically, would have also have given him the inspiration for how to create self sustaining life simply mimicking his the start of the spread of his own existence.

Like David, I have problems with this concept of Christ, but even if I were to accept the basic premise that your God’s son was the start of the creative process, I would still like to know why God created the system that produced this vast variety of material life forms, including humans with their advanced consciousness. I cannot see anything in your earlier post that would invalidate the hypothesis of life as a means of alleviating his boredom: the process began with himself and nothing besides himself, what he created produced a huge and ever changing variety, there were and are elements of randomness that he either could not or would not predict…and unlike David you are not afraid to attribute human thoughts to him - after all, we are “in his image”. So once again (with apologies for harping on about it), can you see anything in the history of life that contradicts the relief-of-boredom hypothesis?