Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 10, 2019, 10:25 (1961 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Of course we may some personality attributes in common with God. But we can only guess at what might be correct. Your hypotheses are following human logic. We cannot know if they are God's, is always my point.

dhw: And your point is correct in all aspects of this discussion: we cannot know if God exists, and if he does, we cannot know his motives for creating life and evolution. But you pretend that you do know: your fixed belief is that (a) he personally preprogrammed/dabbled every single life form, (b) that he did so in order that they should eat or not eat one another for 3.5+ billion years until (c) he specially designed H. sapiens, and (d) H. sapiens was his one and only purpose for creating life. These fixed beliefs are all “guesses”, but you refuse to consider other guesses because we cannot know the truth!

DAVID: I am allowed to have faith which when formed is a fixed belief. It comes from all the evidence I find

Of course you are allowed to believe whatever takes your fancy, even though you “have no idea” why your God would choose your idea of his method to fulfil your idea of his purpose.

DAVID: Once again you gloss over my starting assumption that God chose to create through the process of evolution of all life to reach the goal of humans. Of course this is not history, but under my assumption, history shows what He did.

dhw: Once again, yes, history shows what he did (if he exists). And it does not show that he chose to create billions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders “to reach the goal of humans”. I am not glossing this over; I am pointing out (a) that it is not history, and (b) that it is not logical.

DAVID: My beliefs about God's actions are all logical, once I concluded God is real and acts as history shows us. I am comfortable with the starting logic I used to choose to believe in God.

TONY: I think we reached the same conclusion along slightly different paths. I agree, though. I am firmly convinced God is real, and the logic and evidence that led me there, in my estimation, is strong.

I have no problem with whatever logic you both use to conclude that God is real. My problem is with David’s illogical but fixed beliefs as summarized at the beginning of this post.