Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Saturday, July 06, 2019, 08:14 (1966 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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: I explain my approach as a single judgement. You are the separatist, splitting it into parts. In my view God chose to evolve humans starting with bacteria.

Of course evolution consists of parts: billions of life forms, lifestyles etc. And in your view, God chose to specially design every single one of them, starting out from bacteria. So if you say he chose to evolve humans starting with bacteria, you can hardly pretend that he didn’t “choose to evolve” (which for you means to specially design) the whale’s flipper, the cuttlefish’s camouflage and the weaverbird’s nest starting with bacteria.

DAVID: God ran evolution and produced the history we see. His goal was to eventually evolve humans. You think I am describing a confused and goalless God. I am not. God knew what He was doing all along.

I have no problem with the concept of your God knowing what he was doing all along. It is you who cannot solve the problem of why, if this is so, and his one and only goal was to eventually specially design humans, he “had to” specially design every other non-human life form. Experimentation, for instance, is neither confused nor goalless. Creation for the pleasure of creation is neither confused nor goalless. Seeing what will happen if...is neither confused nor goalless. Wanting to design only humans but specially designing millions of non-human life forms is nothing if not confusing.

DAVID: My position is quite clear. Any guesses as to why He chose this path have been discussed over and over, and are all just guesses, many of which are logical, but the logicality does not prove they are correct. They are equivalent to angels on pin heads.

But at least if they are logical we can say they are logical. You simply cannot find a logical reason for your own guess combining (a) his goal and (b) his method of achieving that goal. Logic therefore suggests that one of these two guesses might be wrong.

DAVID (commenting on “Balance of Nature”, re beavers): All part of the important balance of nature as created by God in his management of evolution. In my view humans were the goal of the creation of the entire process.

A total non sequitur. All ecosystems require some kind of balance if they are to survive. Now please tell us why your God specially designed beavers (not to mention whale flippers and weaverbirds’ nests) when all he actually wanted to do was specially design humans.