Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Friday, July 12, 2019, 19:02 (1743 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The 'had to' is not your interpretation. Mine: If God chose evolution as His method, He knew He 'had to create' everything else before He got to humans. Start with the thought that God chose to evolve! Once that is stated, everything falls into place.

dhw: You want me to start by accepting the concept of evolution I have summarized above, and if I accept this, apparently it all falls into place! It doesn’t fall into place, even for you, as follows:

dhw: In any case, quite understandably, you have “no idea” why he would have “chosen” to fulfil his one and only purpose of designing H. sapiens by first specially designing millions of other life forms extant and extinct (= your interpretation of evolution). Or are you going to deny ever having said that too?

DAVID: Of course I have ' no idea' why He chose to create through evolution. I don't try to humanize his thinking, as you do.

dhw: You can’t think of any logical explanation for your fixed belief that he “chose to create” humans by specially designing millions of non-humans, but it must be right, even though there are other explanations which are perfectly logical. Everything “falls into place” although you can’t see how it falls into place.

DAVID: I cannot question God's choices of action. I do not live in His decision-making process.

dhw: But it is you who have manufactured this particular “choice of action […] What you are really saying is that you refuse to question your own interpretation of your God’s choices of action, i.e. your fixed beliefs, as summarized above.

DAVID: Why should I flip-flop. I've found a theory that for me best fits his actions.

dhw: And it all fits into place provided we assume that your God’s logic is totally incomprehensible. How about assuming that your God’s logic just might be comprehensible, and he might just possibly have some of the human attributes which you believe he created, and the reason why you have “no idea” why he chose a purpose and method you find incomprehensible might just be that one or other of your assumptions about his purpose and method might be wrong?

I have never thought that God's actions were 'totally incomprehensible'. That has always been your problem, not mine. We have the full history of how our reality and we appeared. Some of the mechanisms are guess work, and that is where the concept of God comes into play as the creator. Assuming He creates (which I take on faith), then what we see is what He designed. You constantly try to step in to God's mind and make it part human and present Him as not sure of what He is attempting to do: your proposals that organisms themselves decide on how to evolve themselves further, or He has no full purpose drive and experiments on types of Homos to get to a satisfactory endpoint of sapiens. The difference in our thought patterns is that I see God knowing exactly what He wants and how to do it , and for you He dithers around. And I've agreed with you that all of your proposals are logical assuming the type of God you imagine God happens to be. I just don't agree at all with your imagined image of a humanized God. Our starting assumptions in logic will never agree, and so we will always disagree.