Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Sunday, May 05, 2019, 09:49 (2027 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I was never against your suppositions about God's thoughts, to which you have every right. I have the right to continue to criticize them as humanizing.

dhw: By all means, but I find it hard to imagine how your God could have created love, beauty, humour, hate, cruelty, vanity etc. if as first cause he didn’t have a clue what they were. In any case, since you constantly emphasize your God’s purposefulness, it seems pretty pointless then to dismiss any attempt to extrapolate purpose from the results of his work!

DAVID: I'm sure God knows/knew about all of our attributes which the magnificent brain He gave us allows. I will still insist, God does not think as we do.

dhw: If he exists, of course he is different from us, but if these attributes form part of his thought – as they obviously would since he would be the first cause of everything – then it is clearly absurd to dismiss them as possible factors that may guide his purpose.

DAVID: All we can do is guess at God's thoughts. Our individual concept of who God is, His attributes, etc., will color our perception of Him and His thoughts.

No disagreement there. And I really can’t imagine you believing in him and yet not having a personal, humanized perception of him. But since you keep insisting on his purposefulness, you can hardly complain if I try to analyse what his purposes might be, and how they fit in with the historical facts of life’s history.