Divine purposes and methods (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, January 03, 2019, 10:24 (2149 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: […] we must accept God chose a method and used it. We must accept that from your agnostic viewpoint, God is illogical, because He didn't do it the way you think He should have done it, all from your humanistic logic about Him.

dhw: Of course I accept that if your God exists, he chose a method and used it, and I have no doubt that he would have chosen a perfectly logical way to implement his purpose. I am questioning your logic, not his – namely the dislocation between your insistence that he had only one purpose from the very beginning (us), had full control and could choose any method he liked of producing us, but spent 3.5+ billion years specially designing all the branches of the evolutionary bush.

DAVID: Again you see no logic in God's method. My answer is He did it His way. You question why and I try to give a viewpoint which makes sense in and of itself.

I see no logic in YOUR INTERPRETATION of your God’s method to achieve what you believe to have been his one and only purpose. Once again:

dhw: Why would a God with a single purpose and full control specially design millions of life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct before specially designing the only thing he wanted to design?

DAVID: Again you question the history He created.

No, I question your interpretation of the history he created, as above. If he only wanted to design H. sapiens, why design millions of other life forms that have/had nothing to do with H. sapiens?

dhw: The alternatives I offer above even include the possibility of humans as his goal, and in the past you have agreed that they are all logical. As for diversity, I did not say he loved anything - the word I used was "wanted", so why do you find it illogical to suggest that your God WANTED the variety provided by the ever changing bush of comings and goings that characterizes life’s history?

DAVID: You have humanistically invented a 'want' for Him to follow. You know God better than I do!

I offer various alternatives because I have no idea what your God wanted. It is you who claim to know that he “wanted” only to create H. sapiens, and it is you who insist that despite his full control, he “chose” the method (i.e. that is the method he “wanted” to use) of specially designing 3.5+ billion years’ worth of life forms extant and extinct which had little or nothing to do with H. sapiens.

dhw: Humans are unique in their degree of consciousness (even you admit that other animals are conscious, but to a lesser degree.

DAVID: Minimizing the consciousness gap as usual. Conscious is vastly different from consciousness.

How can conscious be “vastly different” from consciousness? You agree that your dog is conscious/has consciousness, but has nothing like your own degree of it or of your self-awareness.

DAVID: I'm not dislocated. You are floating around in mid-air supposing various God thoughts with no basis in fact. Evolution is not a play so you can invent dialogue as the playwright you are. God is not an actor. He created the play line plot.

dhw: If God exists, of course he wrote the play. But none of these hypothetical plots, including your own, have a basis in fact. The difference between us is that you insist that you know God’s plot: i.e. that his sole purpose was to produce H. sapiens, he knew how to do it, but he chose not to do it until he had specially designed 3.5+ billion years’ worth of life forms etc. so that they could eat each other. I do not insist that I know the plot, I find your version extremely unconvincing, and I offer alternatives which you have agreed fit in logically with the history of life as we know it.

DAVID: I did not invent the plot. I've simply tried to interpret it. I simply took diversity for the food supply and you agree that is logical. You won't accept humans as the goal, but we are here as the current endpoint. Do you envision another? Use current facts. You embellish.

The plot you invented is outlined above. The fact that diverse organisms have to eat one another in order to survive does not explain why your God specially designed them to eat each other for 3.5+ billion years until he specially designed the only thing he wanted to design, which was you and me. I offered you two alternatives which do allow for humans as the goal (experimenting because he didn’t know how to do it, or humans as a late idea during the process of experimentation with all sorts of life forms). These are not embellishments – they are explanations of the gap which you yourself have admitted you can’t explain.