philosophy of science: meaning and functions (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, October 11, 2018, 12:17 (2235 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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

So your God, if he exists, created universes because his purpose was to create universes, and he created life because he wanted to create minds which would try to understand how he did it. I don’t know how many of our fellow living (or dead) organisms have minds that try to understand how he did it, and I don’t know how you even know that this was his purpose anyway. And so, since all further questions are apparently pointless, I suggest the following alternative: we don’t know if God exists, but if he does, his purpose in creating the universe and life must have been to create the universe and life. I’m sure the rabbis in their wisdom would agree that this is the point where inquiry has gone to a final boundary, and we should therefore stop talking about God's purposefulness altogether.

DAVID: 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.

The logic of the hypotheses you are disputing concerns your God’s possible purpose for creating the universe and life. Nothing to do with the logic of design hypotheses relating to his existence. As for why I started the website, I was indeed uncomfortable and even squirming at the standard of debate on both sides concerning Dawkins''The God Delusion', which was the trigger. And so initially I was hoping to encourage a more balanced approach to the whole subject, though I was also acutely aware of my own ignorance. Hence the purpose summarized on the homepage:

"The purpose of this website is to provide a forum for discussion."
"The truth is out there somewhere, and by combining our discoveries, we may help one another to gain new insights."

Thanks largely to you, but also to many others over the 10+ years of its existence, I can honestly say that it has fulfilled that purpose, even though I am still sitting quite comfortably but thoughtfully on my picket fence.