Emergence: not understood (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, January 25, 2019, 10:24 (2127 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Messy is your vision of God enjoying the spectacle of the bush of life and inventing that bush just so He could watch the spectacle of everyone eating each other.

dhw: It is you who insist that the purpose of the spectacle is simply to create organisms to eat one another until 3.5+ billion years have passed. Personally, I see a great deal more in the spectacle: I see sheer beauty as well as sheer horror; I see love as well as suffering (and I’m not just talking about the human world); I see astonishing feats of ingenuity. And you yourself have expressed the view that your hidden God watches it all with interest. Why do you find this messy?

DAVID: What is messy is your constant humanizing God's thinking in your interpretation. As I've noted all along is, if evolution has to last 3.5-8 billion years, as God's choice of method of creation of organisms, then everyone has to be present and in balance to supply the food. I have agreed that God watches with interest as He evolves everyone, but with involved interest as a creator, not a spectator.

As regards “humanizing”, see my post under “Big brain evolution”. You keep talking as if evolution has finished, which is your assumption, and it is not your God’s choice of method of creating organisms that is the problem: you keep telling us that it was God’s choice to take 3.5+ billion years to create us, and so he created millions of other life forms so that they could eat one another before he created us. If God exists, then of course he is the creator, but what makes you think a creator cannot also be a spectator watching the spectacle he creates?