Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Saturday, July 13, 2019, 09:52 (1741 days ago) @ David Turell

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?

DAVID: I have never thought that God's actions were 'totally incomprehensible'. That has always been your problem, not mine.

It’s not your God’s actions that are incomprehensible – it is your INTERPRETATION of his actions that makes no sense. You wrote:
DAVID: “Of course I have ‘no idea’ why he chose to create through evolution.”
Let us remember that for you evolution means your God’s special design of all life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct. What is incomprehensible is that in your version, your God’s one and only purpose was to design H. sapiens, and you have no idea why he “chose” to do so by specially designing millions of other life forms etc.

DAVID: 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.

For the sake of argument, I have accepted the concept of God as the creator. The “full history” is 3.8 billion years of different life forms etc. The points at issue are why and how he designed them.

DAVID: 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.

It is true that both of us try to “step into God’s mind”. The rest is a complete misrepresentation of all my posts, and a poor attempt to divert attention away from your own admission that you cannot find any logic in your own hypothesis, as above. I offer several different theistic hypotheses to explain “the full history” of evolution: God experimenting to get what he wants, or experimenting to see what will happen if…, or humans as latecomers in his thinking, or designing an autonomous creative mechanism because what he wants is unpredictable variety (though he can dabble if he feels like it). You step into your God’s mind and have him wanting to and able to control everything, but wanting only to create H. sapiens, and so you have no idea why he would have designed all the other non-human life forms, or even all the other non-sapiens forms of homo. He just “had to” do it this way.

DAVID: 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.

Your starting assumption “in logic” is that your God has one particular purpose and fulfils it in a way which even you cannot explain, and that means that your God’s logic is incomprehensible to you (again: you have “no idea” why he “had to” do it this way). My starting point is that if God exists, he would know what he wants, and we have no reason to suppose that his logic will be incomprehensible to us, especially since there are several alternative hypotheses which are perfectly logical. It is also perfectly logical to assume that if he created our consciousness with all its attributes, there would be common ground between his attributes and ours. Of course ALL the hypotheses are guesswork (including the very existence of your God). But please note once more that unlike yours, none of my hypotheses represent a fixed belief – that is why I offer different hypotheses.