Problems with this section (Agnosticism)

by dhw, Thursday, November 12, 2009, 16:55 (5277 days ago) @ Frank Paris

Frank continues to explain his process theology to me, and we continue to blunder through one misunderstanding after another. -I've been trying to find out whether you think God knew or did not know that he was creating the mechanisms for life and evolution when he created the "fundamental particles". By linking the world and humanity, I thought I was making it clear that I was referring to life on Earth, which is the only life we know of. I expressed surprise that you did not consider this to be of theological importance. Your reason is now clear: you are not even thinking about life on Earth, but about whether "the fundamentals in any particular universe have the potential to evolve into life" ... to which of course your answer is that you don't know. This is indeed irrelevant to theology; it's also irrelevant to my line of questioning. The problem of Chance v. Design is of theological interest in relation to life on Earth, because if life here came about by accident, this exonerates God from responsibility for suffering. You have merely taken up my remark about the "originality" of this view, but do not seem to have realized that this is the thesis I was concerned with from the start. You have probably also missed the link with the "trick up my sleeve" with which I ended that post. It may be that your study of Aristotelian logic has made you too prone to split things up, and perhaps a little dose of hermeneutics might help you to stick them back together again. Let us therefore move to Part 2 of this particular discussion.-dhw: Given that God must be pretty clever to create the "fundamental particles", has a purpose (to see himself reflected), and has infinite time to fiddle around with his own materials, I really can't see why you should believe he's not capable of creating conscious reflections of himself, whereas blind chance is!-I was referring here to a point you made in an earlier post. You now write: "When have I ever said God is incapable of creating conscious reflections of himself? I believe that all I've said is that in our particular universe God has only created the fundamentals." On 3 November at 16.31, I wrote: "I find [your account] a very coherent scenario, but it could hardly be further away from the belief (27 October 15.45) that "life and the codes for evolution" came about "by accident". You responded: "I don't see that, if you're talking about genetic codes. Those are far beyond the conscious ability of God to create, given the complete lack of control that God has over his fundamental particles once he "cuts them loose"." -I had, perhaps erroneously, assumed there was a link in your theology between genetic codes and the evolution of consciousness, but from my standpoint it makes no difference, since human consciousness could scarcely have evolved without the genetic codes. Let me then spell out my credulity problem to you, although of course I now no longer know what you consider God capable of. I will put in bold those parts which represent the arguments I have taken directly from your various posts; the rest is mine:-I find it difficult to believe that God, given infinite time and his infinite consciousness, and given his purpose, which is to see himself reflected in the universe, does not have the conscious ability to create the genetic codes which have led to human consciousness, whereas blind, unthinking chance can create them (you have "no trouble believing that life and the codes for evolution could have come about by accident").-Your theology needs this theory to exonerate God from responsibility for suffering, which is why I say the Chance v. Design argument is of vital theological concern. Your faith that chance can achieve what God can't at least explains the somewhat muddled affinity you felt with Dawkins in your original smoke-filled post, but it adds a great deal of fuel to the atheist argument that we don't need God to explain anything, so why bother with him at all? If you prefer a more learned formula, then I'll just murmur "Ockham's Razor". -However, none of this has the slightest bearing on the mystic experiences that have given you your faith or your insights. I'm only trying to explain to you why I continue to find the details of your theology confusing. David Turell's very welcome comments seem to me to offer a much clearer and more coherent image of God, and it will be interesting to see if he can untangle the threads better than I can.