Evolution and humans: big brain size uses energy (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 22, 2017, 13:29 (2556 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I believe God is a personality, unlike ours, fully driven by purpose. I don't 'know'. I have developed faith based on a logical, for me, series of conclusions from scientific discoveries. Of course I think in human terms. Your faith for yourself is: "I cannot know much as I might wish to".

dhw: But what is the purpose??? You say it was to produce humans with whom he could have a relationship, but he might have produced more humans elsewhere so he could see how their civilizations turned out. The faith you have logically developed from your knowledge of science is in the existence of a God. The faith you have developed in his purpose for creating life has nothing whatsoever to do with science. As for my “faith”, an acknowledgement of my ignorance can hardly be called faith, and nor can the wish to know more. Faith requires a positive belief in something. My agnosticism is the opposite: it is the inability to have a positive belief in any of the three hypotheses, unless you wish to describe as “faith” the belief that I can’t believe in any of the three hypotheses!

DAVID: I should have read this entry first. My answer is written:
Tuesday, November 21, 2017, 15:03 :
Your phrase, 'closer to the truth' is the key to your thinking. I view one of the three as THE truth. You imply there is possibly a fourth way or more and we can never know for sure, and you cannot except anything beyond absolute proof.

Answered on the fossils thread, but yours is NOT an answer to my comment on “purpose”, which has been a major point of disagreement between us. If God exists, I would also see him as full of purpose, and for years we have argued the toss about your contention that the purpose of the whole higgledy-piggledy bush, with all its allegedly specially designed innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct, was to keep life going until he could produce the brain of Homo sapiens. This has nothing to do with the EXISTENCE of God or with science. It is a speculation that raises question after question, which you admit you cannot answer, and yet you refuse to consider an alternative which you agree fits in with the whole history.