Divine purposes and methods (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, January 05, 2019, 17:33 (2147 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: If he only wanted to design H. sapiens, why design millions of other life forms that have/had nothing to do with H. sapiens?

DAVID: Yes logical, which does not require acceptance as the 'best' explanations. A concept of God who decides His actions in required. Mine is not yours.

dhw: And yours includes the fact that you don’t understand it yourself. Why do you think a God who decides to experiment has not decided to experiment?

I'm not supposed to understand it from God's viewpoint. I simply accept what He did and explain the need for food.

DAVID: I know the history. The explanation is ecosystems for food supply. Nothing more. That is obvious. Why invent extra possibilities?

dhw: And what was the purpose of supplying food for specially designed organisms which had nothing to do with the only organism he wanted to design which – according to you –was H. sapiens?

You keep, perhaps purposely, ignoring the fact that God chose to evolve humans over lots of time.

DAVID: I can't explain God's reasoning, so why shouldn't I simply accept history as I see it and find the one logical explanation of ecosystems for food, which life has to have to continue to evolve over time. […] You constantly try to humanize God to fit your own human puzzlement. He is not human!

dhw: Yet again: What was the point of specially designing 3.5+ billion years’ worth of food if his only purpose was to specially design H. sapiens? That is the point you cannot answer, but, as I wrote yesterday: you agree that this gap is closed if he had to experiment in order to achieve his purpose (i.e. didn’t know how to do it) or if humans came as a late afterthought as he experimented to see what he could come up with through all these different life forms). Why do you ignore these perfectly logical answers to the question?

Those are logical human suppositions, but God is not human and His reasons are not revealed to us. So you can suppose about Him all you want. I accept that He chose to evolve us and the massive diversity of life supplies food from the various ecosystems to supply ongoing evolution until humans arrived in sapiens form. I doubt major evolution will ever occur again.

dhw: You keep harping on about purpose, wrongly claim that my version of your God is not purposeful, and you offer the extremely human purpose mentioned above [he wants us to think about him and to have a relationship with him], but if I offer an alternative purpose (relief of his isolation), you say I’m humanizing him, and when I suggest he wanted to create the bush (= purpose) you say I “have humanistically invented a ‘want’ for Him to follow”, though you say that God wanting humans to appear explains their appearance. Do you not detect a hint here of double standards?

DAVID: Can't you see how you are attempting in this paragraph of suppositions how you are trying to impose human reasoning on Him? Humans are the current endpoint, but you are not sure God wanted them?

dhw: That is not what I have said at all! I have offered you two explanations of the gap between what he wanted and what he did. And now you have done precisely what I keep complaining about: you harp on about God’s purpose, you impose a purpose and method on him as a result of your own human reasoning, which you admit doesn’t make sense to you (you can’t explain it), and when I offer you a different interpretation of his purpose and method which DOES make sense to you, you try to dismiss it as “human reasoning”!

You invent too much about God. He has offered no explanations. Keep it simple: God chose to evolve us. Obvious, since we are the current and probably the last endpoint of evolution. Our consciousness is not a necessary event from the standpoint of improvements for survival. Survival is no issue if we accept bacterial persistence. Increasing complexity of life is obvious at each new stage of evolution, with no need for that advancement for survival. So if complexity appears to be driven by a 'force' and we sapiens finally are here, the only explanation needed for the diversity of life is the food supply energy for evolution to occur over 3.8 billion years. And you've agreed about the need for the food! Keep the reasoning simple as I just did. God chose to evolve life. Accept it.