Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Monday, July 01, 2019, 11:36 (1970 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Please tell us which of them agrees with you that your God designed every single life form, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder, and that he did so for the sole purpose of getting all life forms to eat or not eat one another until he specially designed the only thing he wanted to design, H. sapiens.

DAVID: They do not discuss econiches as we do.

Of course not. The subject is totally irrelevant to the design argument and to the existence of God and to your fixed belief that your God specially designed everything etc.…as above.

DAVID: I am allowed a fixed interpretation. You are the one with an imagination about what/who God might be.

Your fixed interpretation is your imagination of your God’s purpose (humans) and of his illogical method (you have “no idea why”) of achieving that purpose (special design of millions of non-humans), and of his nature (always knows what he wants, always knows how to get it, has total control), but sacrifices control of humans (see free will below).

DAVID: […] perhaps He has limits or that He chose to evolve everything. Either/or.

dhw: But you absolutely refuse to accept the possibility that he has limits. […] If you accepted limits, you would accept the logic of experimentation, or humans as a late afterthought.

DAVID: The record does not indicate He had limits based on the history of the universe, the Earth and of life itself.

Once more, the record (= history of life) does not show that God exists, and if he does, it does not show that he has limits or total control, or that he specifically designed every single life form etc., or that he did so for the sole purpose of specially designing H. sapiens. Hence my different hypotheses to explain the record (= history of life), all of which you agree are logical, unlike your fixed belief which even you cannot explain.

DAVID: Because I view Him as in charge of conducting and designing all of evolution. It is God who speciates, my solution to understanding that problem. Speciation requires design!

dhw: But the one and only purpose of specially designing H. sapiens does not require the design of all the above, so why did he “have to” design them?

DAVID: Creating humans by evolution required He design everything to satisfy the requirements of evolving the form.

So he had to design the whale’s flipper and the salmon’s migratory reproduction system and the weaverbird’s nest to satisfy his own requirements for specially designing the form of H. sapiens. And you consider this to be logical.

DAVID: Same old retreat to your humanized view of God. In your view God allows an 'unpredictable' course of evolution. My God is supremely purposeful. He knows exactly what He wants to have happen.

dhw: My view is no more humanized than yours. There are plenty of humans who know exactly what they want to have happen. But supremely purposeful does not mean they know how to get what they want, so experimentation is one possibility. Another possibility is that your God WANTED unpredictability. Why should he WANT puppets on his strings? (You hate to acknowledge that human free will is an example of unpredictability – or do you believe in predestination?) If he WANTED human unpredictability, maybe he also WANTED unpredictable evolution (but allowed himself to dabble).

DAVID: Your God is a large part human as you add all these human attributes to Him.

Neither you nor anybody can say that he has no human attributes. Frankly, if he doesn’t, he might just as well not be there as far as we humans are concerned, so I can’t help wondering why he would have wanted to create us in the first place. But how an always-in-control, all-planning being can create human attributes (e.g. love) without having the slightest experience of them is way beyond my comprehension.

DAVID: I agree with our free will we are unpredictable. The right to dabble means He keeps total control of evolution, but not of His desired creatures He created, humans. Your argument makes no sense. Other than in Bible stories, there is no evidence God has ever tried to control us.

My argument is that if he was prepared to give us free will, i.e. NOT to control us (= he WANTED unpredictability), he may also have been prepared to give evolution free rein, i.e. NOT to control it (= he WANTED unpredictability). I only mention free will in that context. (But always with the option of dabbling in both contexts.)