Divine purposes and methods (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, January 07, 2019, 11:47 (1898 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: It is you who insist that this was God’s choice! It is not a fact that God said to himself (I am simply summarizing your hypothesis): “My only purpose is to specially design humans, and I choose to take 3.5+ billion years to do it, and so I will specially design millions of other life forms to eat each other until the time has passed.” Even you can’t understand such thinking, as you admit:
DAVID: I can't explain God's reasoning, so why shouldn't I simply accept history as I see it …?

dhw: Because it doesn’t make sense even to you!

DAVID: It is your problem, not mine. It doesn't matter to me that God chose to evolve us. It makes perfect sense that God wanted to do it that way, if you simply accept that God does what He wants as the controller.

If he exists, of course he does what he wants. But you make him want what you want him to want (to specially design H. sapiens), although for reasons you don’t understand, you have him waiting 3.5+ billion years while he specially designs millions of other life forms so that they can eat each other.

DAVID: Your problem is that you constantly try to humanize Him and apply your human reasoning. I never do. At your urging I've offered possible reasons for God's actions as polite responses to your questioning , but never positive that any of those discussions were productive of real possibilities.

So what reasoning are you using when you insist that your God only wanted to design us but chose to spend 3.5+ billion years designing other things? You and I can only use our human reason, but we can’t be positive about any of our speculations. Your human reasoning has come up with a hypothesis that you can’t understand, and so you tell us that it is God’s reasoning/logic and we must simply accept it!

DAVID: Again it is you who question God's logic to use evolution to reach our form. I simply accept it. You want to humanize Him with your human logic. Why bother? God does what God wants.

Once more, I am NOT questioning your God’s logic. I am questioning YOUR human logic, which makes no sense even to you. Yes, your God does what your God wants. That does not mean he does what you want him to want! That is a speculative "maybe". Well, maybe he wanted to create what he created: the ever-changing higgledy-piggledy bush of life. And maybe later on he wanted a being with self-awareness, or maybe he wanted us from the start but needed to experiment before finding out how to do it. Why should we “simply accept” that you know what he wanted and you know he chose a method that you don’t understand?


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