Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Sunday, April 28, 2019, 11:38 (1817 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is perfectly logical to assume God chose to evolve humans as His means of creation. It requires no further speculation.

For anyone who believes in God and evolution, of course it is logical to assume that he chose evolution as his means of creation! And he used it to create not just humans but also billions of non-human life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders, and that is the problem for your anthropocentric interpretation of life’s history, which you cannot solve and therefore try to gloss over, as follows:

DAVID: You refuse to consider Adler's philosophic position about our specialness, as a way to define God's purpose.

You have simply ignored my response to this. I wrote: "All species are different in kind, but the huge and always acknowledged gulf between our level of consciousness/intelligence and that of other species [i.e. Adler's view of our specialness"] 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.

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.

dhw: 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: Once again all you are doing is going over possible causes of God's choice of mechanism of creation. I firmly state that God started life, something you slip over in your argument.

An absurd accusation, when I am tackling the issue of your God’s possible purposes and methods!

DAVID: If He created life, it is perfectly logical He proceeded to design forms in evolution to achieve His definite purpose as outlined by Adler. The God I envision is very firm in his resolve. Yours is squishy. And later: Your view of a mamby-pamby God is not mine.

More slithering. You have no idea why your God chose to specially design billions of non-human forms in order to specially design the only form he wanted to design. You keep admitting that you can’t explain it, and that all my alternatives fit in logically with the history of life. The idea that your God may have created something for his own enjoyment does not deprive him of his firm resolve or of his power. Why on earth you should consider that your own proposed analogy of a painter enjoying his art makes the artist squishy and namby-pamby I don’t know.

dhw: 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).

DAVID: We have discussed a plethora of possible logical reasons for God to create humans. The only thing we can safely say with assurance is that He wanted to do it.

The only reasons you have come up with are that God wanted us to admire his works, and also wanted to have a relationship with us. Please give us your other proposals, and explain to us why these are not “squishy” or “namby-pamby”.

dhw: 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: A very strained equivalence. No organism but humans makes introspective decisions.

You know very well that the analogy only concerns giving up control.