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

by dhw, Thursday, November 23, 2017, 13:52 (2555 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Your approach turns God into a spectator of His creation which He enjoys, I assume. I avoid humanizing Him as much as I can considering I think as a human and He is a personality like no other personality, i.e., not a human personality.

But you have acknowledged in the past that he and we may well share certain characteristics. You “avoid humanizing him” because although you believe he is full of purpose, you would rather not tell us what you think that purpose might be. However, when pressed, you speculate that he wants us to think about him, wants a relationship with us, watches us with interest (= God as spectator), and I recall that some time ago his creation of nasty things was a means of making us use the intelligence he has given us (also fits in nicely with the spectacle hypothesis). But looming over all these humanizing (and why not, if our consciousness is part of his?) speculations is your insistence that the purpose behind the whole history of life is US. As we keep seeing, this interpretation of evolution leads you into a labyrinth of anomalies which you cannot escape from, and yet you still refuse to consider an alternative THEISTIC interpretation which would give you a direct route out!