Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Saturday, April 27, 2019, 13:36 (1819 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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. [I went on to list your three totally non-historical speculations, repeated with asterisks below.***] 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!

DAVID: My concept of a purposeful God is obviously not your casual theistic approach to studying Him. You constantly ignore Adler's philosophic point that we are so different in kind it is obvious we were purposefully evolved. My complete list of logical conclusions gave me very reasonable structure to accept God. Have you noticed, I've quit speculating?

You have not quit speculating. You have quit trying to find any logical link between your various speculations. If your God exists, then directly or indirectly he is responsible for EVERY life form that has ever evolved. All species are different in kind, but the huge and always acknowledged gulf between our level of consciousness/intelligence and that of other species has no bearing on your continued insistence (though you now claim it is not a belief) that ALL the others were specifically designed (= preprogrammed or dabbled), and your God specifically designed them in order to keep life going until he “purposefully evolved” (= preprogrammed or dabbled) the only life form he wanted to evolve: H. sapiens, who is the latest known life form***. That is the COMBINATION of speculations you refuse to quit, despite the fact that you have no idea why he would have chosen your speculative method to achieve your speculative purpose rather than any of the others I have proposed. This is not a matter of “acceptance” but of blinkered speculation.

DAVID: Ah, slinking back to your favorite non-issue. I will not back down from the logical point that God has the right to choose to evolve humans rather than directly create them as in the OT.

Ah, slinking back to slithering over the issue. Of course he had the right to choose. But once again: your concept of evolution is special design (by programming or dabbling) of every single life form extant and extinct, including humans. I have suggested that he did NOT specially design every single life form, or – if humans really were his sole purpose – he may have had to experiment, or humans may have come late on in his thinking. You simply keep refusing to view your hypotheses as a whole, and it is their COMBINATION which is so illogical that you yourself cannot explain it.

DAVID: […] Control of evolution is not at all equivalent to human choices of action in life.

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

DAVID: Very poor analogy. Evolution requires constant design planning if a goal is to be achieved. You deny goals and humans were a special creation allowed to have free choice. An analogies are best when equal.

I do not deny goals or design (planning is another matter), but I challenge your concept of a single goal for the whole of life (designing H. sapiens), and I propose that your God wanted the process of evolution to produce an ever changing variety of life forms by setting up a system of different intelligences responding autonomously in different ways to a variety of conditions. That is also precisely what happens when humans have free will. Two possible examples of your God deliberately giving up control (though retaining the option to dabble).

[…]

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

dhw: No, and that is why I am challenging your assumption that your God chose to remain in full command. [...] 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.

DAVID: Back to a human God who loves shows and spectacles.

Back to your insistence on God’s purposefulness, which is limited to specially designing a bush of life forms for the sole purpose of eating or not eating one another until he specially designs H. sapiens, for which he has no purpose, or if he has, we mustn’t talk about it because you happen to know that your God has no characteristics in common with his creations (except perhaps enjoyment, desire for admiration and for a relationship with us).