Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, November 30, 2018, 18:39 (2183 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: But now perhaps you’ll tell me why a God who is capable of not knowing what he wants, or of knowing what he wants but having trouble working out how to get it, is incapable of wanting something to keep himself occupied.

DAVID: I don't know why you are suddenly asking me questions about an image of God that is yours, not mine. I view God as purposeful in everything He does.

dhw:There is nothing sudden here. We have been discussing this for ages! What is the point in telling us that God is purposeful if you refuse to discuss what that purpose might be? In fact you tell us that his purpose in specially designing 50,000 spider webs etc. etc. was to specially design H. sapiens. That does not seem logical to me. But you are prepared to consider the possibility that he was experimenting, i.e. did not know what he wanted, or knew what he wanted, but didn’t know how to get it. Hence the question I asked you above, which you refuse to answer. For the sake of brevity, I will comment in brackets on the rest of your post.

DAVID: He is The Creator in religions' concept of Him. (Yes.) I really know nothing more about HIM. (Nobody knows any more, so why do you insist that his purpose in creating 50,000 webs etc. was to produce humans?) He understands the complexity of life He has designed, because He knew how to do it and make it perpetually alive. (Obviously, if he created it. But you keep telling us he was purposeful, and then you refuse to discuss his possible purpose – see above.) I don't scurry back to design. Design and God are totally intertwined in any philosophic view of the question whether God exists. (This whole discussion is about his purpose, not about whether he exists.) Design is why you admit you are agnostic. (Yes.) When you delve into God's personality you are getting back to Adler's wise admonition He is a personage like no other person. (We cannot KNOW anything, including whether your God exists, but this forum exists to discuss all the related subjects. I do not think a possible God’s nature and purpose should be off limits, especially when you go on and on about your God’s purposefulness). He is pure energy and we are material persons who have minds and reason, and are a little similar to Him but no more. When you try to make God a person like us, you are in very murky waters, with guesses and nothing more. (I am not making him a person like us. I am suggesting he may have some of our characteristics if we are created “in his image”. You have agreed on the possibility that evolution might be an experiment - endowing him with human ignorance of one kind or another. And so we come back to my original question: if one possibility is the human-type desire to find out what would happen if…or to find a way of creating what he wants to create, why do you refuse to accept that another possibility might be the human-type desire for an occupation?)

In all of the above mashed get-together paragraph in one strange theme. You ask what is God's purpose and I keep telling everyone it was to create current humans, and then you tell me I haven't answered you which means that you want to know about His underlying thought pattern as to why He chose that purpose. I don't know why you need that guess on my part. It is all part of your attempt to study Him as if He were human or part human due to the fact that He and we have consciousness. What is wrong with accepting that we humans are the current and probably the real end point of a long process? And simply being satisfied with it? Dayenu. Do you think His motives are nefarious? Knowing his motives will not help you accept God. Nor will guessing create any more understanding of God than we have now.