Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Friday, July 05, 2019, 12:34 (1966 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What you don't recognize is that econiches are vital to having a long-term evolution. God designed them because of the necessity.
And under “Balance of Nature”
QUOTE: "'But the life of an insect is pretty much governed by these basic things: eating, reproducing, and avoiding being eaten before you do the other two. So I don’t they would have time for play, just for fun. Everything pretty much has meaning. (DAVID’s bold)

DAVID: dhw loves to discuss and denigrate animals eating animals in ecosystems, which are created by God in His design of evolution. This author would disagreed with dhw! Nature must be in superb balance, all during the time from the first bacteria to the current time with humans.

I do not denigrate animals eating animals, but have pointed out over and over again that ecosystems are only temporarily in “superb balance” because they constantly change in accordance with which life forms are dominant at the time. But the main point, to which thousands of changing "balances" are entirely irrelevant, is your fixed belief that your God specially designed every life form and every ecosystem just so that all the life forms would or would not eat one other, which makes a mockery of your fixed belief that the only thing he wanted to specially design was H. sapiens! Once again, please stop separating your hypotheses when you know that it is the COMBINATION of hypotheses that you yourself cannot explain.

DAVID: He could not have gotten to forming humans unless He did all the things you object to.

I don’t object to any of the history of life! I object to your insistence that he could not have specially designed H. sapiens if he had not specially designed the weaverbird’s nest and billions of other life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders.

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.

DAVID: 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.

So your God’s only purpose was to create us, but we must not ask why he did so, and we must believe that he specially designed all the non-human life forms for the purpose of making them eat or not eat one another, which has nothing to do with his only purpose of creating us. If you would rather not guess at your God’s purposes, I suggest you drop the subject of purpose altogether, since the only guess you do make leads you to the fixed belief that he had to design the weaverbird’s nest etc. because otherwise he “couldn’t have gotten to forming humans”.