Consciousness: and brain damage (General)

by dhw, Saturday, January 27, 2018, 13:26 (2490 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You conveniently forget your humanizing and oft repeated belief that God watches us with interest and wants a relationship with us.

DAVID: I have given those opinions about God because watching with interest would be a natural response for a Creator, which does not necessarily make Him human like us. As for having us seek a relationship with Him, that is the expectation from giving us our superior brain, and not necessarily a human desire of His. What He expects to have happen is not necessarily from a human desire.

Nobody in his right mind would claim that a being which can create a whole universe is “human like us”. That does not mean we do not share certain characteristics. It seems highly unlikely that the organisms you believe your God created could have invented love, hate, curiosity, pleasure, desire etc. while your God knew nothing about such matters. Nor do I accept that terms such as interest and relationship are not “humanizing”, even if we don’t know the exact nature of the interest/relationship.

dhw: ...here’s an alternative hypothesis (not dogma, and not even belief): God’s purpose in creating the ever changing bush of life was to create an ever-changing bush of life, including humans, and his method was to give organisms an autonomous means of diversifying. No humanizing there, so that objection flies out of the window; “why try?” goes out of the window too, because if you can try, I can try; and you have repeatedly acknowledged that there is nothing in this hypothesis that does not fit in with the history of life on Earth. There is no proof for either of our hypotheses, so what other reason do you have for not considering mine?

DAVID: I can almost fully agree, except, as you know, I will still declare we are His main goal.

I do not ask you to believe my hypothesis. I ask you not to dismiss it, and to recognize that it is a feasible alternative to your own. This would be another red letter day in the history of the AgnosticWeb if I could be sure that you would stick to it.