Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Friday, April 26, 2019, 10:10 (1820 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: An 'ever changing spectacle' is humanizing God in the extreme. A purposeful God does not need spectacle. In my view, He fully knows what He wants as a goal, and accomplishes it.

dhw: I agree that your purposeful God would fully know and accomplish his goal, which you say was to produce humans. If you can speculate on that, why shouldn’t we speculate on possible purposes for producing the bush and humans? A while ago you volunteered enjoyment, wanting us to admire his work, and wanting a relationship with us. How do you know that a one-and-only God didn’t get fed up with his isolation? How do you know that he doesn’t produce things for enjoyment, or that he doesn’t have a range of feelings like ours: love, hate, boredom, fascination, pleasure, disgust, loneliness? Do you really believe a creator could create such things without knowing them himself? Of course we can only humanize, but that doesn’t mean that our humanizations are wrong.

DAVID: But it also means we cannot know if speculations are in any way correct. What we do know assuming that God is in charge, and He chose to evolve humans from the first bacteria. That is historical fact.

Hold on! Not even the existence of God is historical fact. But IF he exists, and since we both accept the theory of common descent, we agree that he would have chosen to evolve ALL forms of life from earlier forms. That does not mean (a) that his sole purpose was to produce humans, (b) that his only method of evolving all forms of life was special design by preprogramming or dabbling, or (c) that he specially designed all forms of life so that they would eat or not eat one another until he specially designed humans. Of course my proposals concerning his nature, purpose and method are speculative. And your statement that “a purposeful God does not need spectacle” is as speculative as all your other hypotheses concerning the existence, purpose and method of your God. All answers to "unanswered questions" are speculative!

dhw: The only evolutionary methods you propose are divine preprogramming and dabbling, which both entail special design. You apply this not only to the human brain but also to whale flippers, cuttlefish camouflage, monarch lifestyle and the construction of the weaverbird’s nest. And you have no idea why your God specially designed (preprogrammed/dabbled) all this when, according to you, he only wanted to specially design (preprogramme/dabble) us. It is YOU who have him diddling around!

DAVID: Consider first life: It is extremely complex if it is to survive. And it is no where close to the complexity of an introspective human brain. You've accepted if God is in charge He has the right to evolve each and every of His goals. I persist in viewing God as choosing to evolve more and more complexity over the time necessary. No diddling. Each new advanced design may well require design planning considerations. Preprogramming or constant dabbling are each probabilities of method.

Now you are focusing on the argument for design, and completely ignoring the point at issue, which is that you have no idea why a God whose sole purpose is to produce humans would choose to specially design millions of other complex non-human life forms before specially designing the only one he wants to design. THAT is the diddling around which you cannot explain.

dhw: If God exists, cellular intelligence would denote his CHOICE not to control the history, but to allow it to run its own course, just as you believe he gave humans free will so that they could create their own history.

DAVID: […] In the final step, humans are allowed to control their actions (history), but not their evolution, which your bolded twisted logic implies.

dhw: Yet again you are missing the point of the analogy. If he was willing to give up control over human actions, why should he not have been willing to give up control over the direction of evolution? In both cases your “this is what will happen…” gives way to my “let’s see what will happen if…”

DAVID: I didn't miss your 'logic'. Control of evolution is not at all equivalent to human choices of action in life.

Of course it’s not. The analogy is that in both scenarios, your God would purposefully have given up control.

[…]

dhw: …these are the alternatives: cellular intelligence versus a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or direct divine dabbling for every convergent solution, as these are the only forms of “instructions” you can come up with.

DAVID: Can you come up with other methods of instructing, considering God is running the show in full command?

No, and that is why I am challenging your assumption that your God chose to remain in full command. Like yourself, I find it impossible to explain why he would specially design (through preprogramming and/or dabbling) whale flippers, cuttlefish camouflage, monarch migration and the weaverbird’s nest if all he wanted to design was the brain of H. sapiens. And so as an alternative I am proposing that he chose to create a form of “show” or spectacle which would run itself through cellular intelligence, though always allowing him the option of dabbling if he felt like it.