Divine purposes and methods (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, December 20, 2018, 10:17 (1916 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: [God] sees himself as gaining nothing for himself, except the satisfaction of a job well done.

dhw: Why do you think your first-cause, isolated God needed to do something that would bring him satisfaction?

DAVID: We view God differently. He is purposeful in creation. He exists to create.

Of course he is purposeful (if he exists). I don’t understand what you mean by “he exists to create”. As first cause, he must make his own purposes. So why do you think he wanted to give himself the satisfaction of a job well done?

dhw: I accept your scientific reasons (design) for your faith that God is the creator, but with my theist hat on, I can make no sense of your highly subjective reading (totally divorced from science) of his powers, purpose, and method of achieving that purpose, the three of which you yourself cannot fit together.

DAVID: I don't fit them together, just interpret what I see.
Later: If God chose to evolve, and He did, and as humans are the goal as I see it, life had to eat during the 3.5+ billion years. Perfectly logical, but unacceptable to you for some reason I cannot see.

You yourself can’t understand why he chose to specially design 3.5+ billion years’ worth of innovations, econiches etc. in order to fulfil what you think was his one and only purpose of producing H. sapiens, even though you think he is always in full control. What you refuse to see is that your own mystification at such an indirect method might mean that your interpretation of the method or of the purpose could be wrong.

Dhw …why specially create the whale if he could have created us without the whale?

DAVID: Simply because He obviously didn't want to do it that way. Just accept what history tells us.

History does not tell us that your God created the whale for the sole purpose of providing a new econiche in order to provide food until he could produce H. sapiens, which he could have done whenever he liked since he was always in full control.

dhw: We are discussing your insistence that survival plays little or no role in evolution. So did your God perform the above operations for the satisfaction of creating a new toothless whale and a new ecosystem (nothing to do with fulfilling his sole purpose of creating us), or were they designed to enable the pre-whale and pre-baleen whale to survive?

DAVID: New forms have to be designed to survive, or what is the purpose of these new organisms? And later: Of course new organisms had to designed to survive or evolution stops.

If they have to be designed to survive, how can you argue that survivability plays no part in the design?

DAVID: God designs us for survivability. If we didn't survive, what is the point of making us? My view is survivability does not drive evolution, God does.

You have been on and on about evolution resulting from the drive for complexity as opposed to the drive for survival. I am pointing out to you that even if your God did design whale fins and baleens and 50,000 spider webs and the monarch’s migration and the cuttlefish’s camouflage, these all serve the purpose of enabling those organisms to survive. Therefore even in your hypothesis, survivability plays a major role in your God’s design, and hence in your God-controlled evolution.


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