philosophy of science: meaning and functions (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, October 10, 2018, 18:37 (2235 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: What sort of God are you now trying to conjure up? A vast blob of conscious energy that has no feelings, no identity, no self? All this because although you constantly insist on how purposeful he is, you cannot stand the thought that his purpose might have been to keep himself occupied.

DAVID: As an eternal being God is not tied to a passage of time, which to humans creates a requirement to fill that time with productive efforts or pass-timing. I'm sure God contains all of the human attributes of thought in His thoughts we have but He is much more than that as He proceeds to create. We can only guess at his motives, so why bother?

dhw: So your God apparently creates universe after universe (before and after = time) containing humans whose behaviour (which requires befores and afters) he can observe with interest while also revelling in the joy of creation (which also requires befores and afters), but he does not feel any requirement to do so. He just does so with no purpose in mind, although for ten years you have hammered home the message that your God is purposeful. And now, as I continue to pursue YOUR argument, and as you can clearly find no fault in the logic of my hypothesis but dislike its implications, you resort to “why bother?” We don’t even know whether your God exists. We can’t know. So why bother to ask? Why did you bother to write two brilliant books about it, and why did I bother to set up this website? We bother because we care, and one of the inspiring things about humans is that, for all our faults and for all our ignorance, we refuse to give up.

We don't stop because we all enjoy using our searching minds to try and achieve some answers to the imponderable questions, such as why is there anything? God's obvoius purpose is to create universes and living organisms with consciousness that are broad enough in mental capacity to try and understand how God did it. You want His underlying motives to be revealed Your questions imply why does He have this purpose. Stop and think that God has a consciousness which has no bounds that we can be aware of. We humans have limits to what mental capacities we have, so how can we really know what underlying purposes God has? That is why I at first tried to accommodate your persistent questions as His possible purposes and now I've basically given up because the avenue to inquiry has no answers we can accept as possible truths. I accept what I have see God has given us, and follow the Passover thought: 'deyanu', it is enough. Rabbis who created this service have enough wisdom to understand there is a point where inquiry has gone to a final boundary.

We might just as well wonder why you started this site. I can conjure up possibilities: primarily you are uncomfortable in your picket fence position. You are surrounded by atheists on one side and theists on the other and both groups are sure in their positions, while you squirm without any answers except 'I can't believe anything' or 'I won't believe anything'. And I don't accept your hypotheses as logical since they start from a position of not accepting the logical necessity of the designed complexity of life requires a designing mind.