Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, July 04, 2019, 21:51 (1967 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Wanting to evolve humans from bacteria is totally logical. Econiches are also logical. You are the one who views my God as illogical. Your suppositions about God are always over-humanizing Him.

dhw: It is your view of your God that I see as illogical. I believe that God, if he exists, would be logical. You and I believe that ALL life forms evolved from bacteria. It is not logical that he only wanted one life form to evolve from bacteria and yet specially designed millions of non-human life forms. Econiches provide food for ALL forms of life. It is not logical that your God designed all econiches in order to fulfil what you believe to have been his only purpose of designing H. sapiens. I do not make any suppositions about your God, but offer different alternatives, all of which you agree fit in logically with the history of life as we know it.

What you don't recognize is that econiches are vital to having a long-term evolution. God designed them because of the necessity .

DAVID: The only thing I cannot explain is why God made the choice to evolve, rather than direct creation. The history of evolution obviously shows what God did. You object to the history. Of course going from bacteria to humans involved designing everything along the way. Do econiches exist? Of course and with purpose. Evolution over time requires an energy source fur life to continue.

dhw: I do not object to the history, which tells us only that all kinds of life forms and lifestyles and econiches have been and gone, and humans are the latest species to have evolved. I object to your view of evolution as your God specially designing every single life form, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life, and I do not understand why – as you wrote earlier - he “had to” design them all in order to design the only thing he wanted to design. I suggest he may have had a different motive for specially designing them, or he didn't specially design them. Of course econiches exist, and they constantly change, and they provide food for whichever life forms survive in them. Nothing whatsoever to do with your God’s sole purpose being to design H. sapiens.

He could not have gotten to forming humans unless He did all the things you object to. See today's entries on the subject. Your view comes from an insistence of viewing him in partial human form, or state of mind.

dhw: I note that you have not commented on my own disbelief that a first cause God can create attributes of which he has no knowledge or experience, plus the fact that a God without human attributes might just as well not be there, since clearly he and we would have nothing whatsoever in common.

DAVID: Your first cause God is simplistic. If God can plan a universe of the complexity it is, He can know in advance the attributes of human emotions. Whether He uses those emotions himself is not known but certainly possible.

dhw: Your view of God is illogical and also inconsistent. If it is possible that he knows and “uses” those emotions, then why do you refuse to accept that those emotions might possibly give us a reason for his creating life, including humans? Your refusal, however, is only intermittent. At times you accept that your God might enjoy his own creativity just as a painter enjoys his own paintings, and you even suggest that he wants us to admire his work and to have a relationship with us, which would be mighty difficult if we had no shared attributes.

The only reason I've suggested possible attributes of God is because I've made guess after you have pushed me to do so, out of politeness. I'd rather not guess, as taught by Adler.