Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Monday, June 03, 2019, 11:28 (1998 days ago) @ David Turell

I have telescoped different threads, as the arguments are repeated.

DAVID (on “whale” thread) Of course God knew He had to design all the levels of evolution until He reached the human level!

Please explain why God “had to” specially design the whale’s flipper, the cuttlefish’s camouflage, the monarch lifestyle and the weaverbird’s nest until he reached human level. Please don’t say they all had to eat or not eat each other until he could specially design H. sapiens.

DAVID: God prefers to evolve His end goals, as I have described about the universe, the Milky Way, the Earth, and finally life.

The only goal you’ve ever offered is H. sapiens. What other end goals do you now envisage? I do not have a problem with the argument that all these things evolved. I believe in evolution. My problem is your insistence that he personally designed every life form etc., and he did so for the sole purpose of producing H. sapiens, which he specially designed anyway.

DAVID: The God you try to describe comes across as empty-headed, bumbling His way forward. Ridiculous!

Where do you get that from? I have consistently proposed that your God may have created life as an occupation for himself. This is not empty-headed. I have also proposed that he invented an autonomous mechanism to provide the fascinating variety of life forms which constitutes the history of life on Earth. That is not bumbling. In TWO of my hypotheses, I have proposed experimentation or afterthought for humans, since you yourself have “no idea” why your God chose your interpretation of his method to achieve your interpretation of his purpose.

Dhw: (under “bipedalism") I suggest the process was a natural progression as the perhaps God-given autonomous IM [inventive mechanism] in all organisms responded to the changing conditions which you think may have been out of the control of your totally-in-control God.

DAVID: I know you want a free-wheeling IM. The only autonomy I accept in our theorizing about the possibility of an IM is the organisms can initiate the process.

I asked how they could initiate it if it was already preprogrammed, or God popped in to do a dabble. Your version of an autonomous IM is an IM without autonomy!

DAVID: As usual you have no answer for my concept that God prefers to carefully evolves what He desires to create. I use history which agrees as the basis of my thinking.

History shows the evolution of millions of non-human life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders, with humans a late arrival. I have no problem with the theistic view that he used evolution to create what he wanted to create. I dispute the logic of your claim that he ONLY wanted to create H. sapiens, and therefore specially designed anything but H. sapiens for 3.5+ billion years.

DAVID: Our disagreement is then God's purpose. we've discussed this before. My God fully knows from the beginning what He wants to achieve, but his chosen method is to evolve everything, every step along the way.

I am not disputing the concept of a God who fully knows from the beginning what he wants to achieve (see above), and who uses evolution to achieve it. Our disagreement, yet again, is over your blinkered view that he specially created every single life form etc., although his one and only purpose was to produce H. sapiens, whom he also specially created late on in the process. As always, you gloss over the incongruity of these details through generalisations which I do not dispute.