Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 13, 2019, 15:39 (1958 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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.

The bold is a total distortion of my view. I start with the Adler approach that humans are so special they had to be God's goal , and follow that by recognizing that humans arrived through an evolutionary process. Therefore, God chose to evolve humans. Very straight forward reasoning. The 'no idea' issue is recognizing that God as a creator produced the universe in the beginning without evolving it's creation. Therefore, God might be seen as having direct creation ability, and might have the ability to directly create humans, but chose not to. If that is the case then I 'have no idea' why He chose evolution, but the evidence is that He likes to evolve: create the universe and evolve it, create the special Earth and evolve it. start life and evolve it. All entirely logical.

dhw: 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.

I have never said God 'had to do it this way.' God chose to use the method of evolution. His reasons are outlined in my answer above. And as usual your have reviewed an unpurposed God from your imagination.

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.

dhw; Your starting assumption “in logic” is that your God has one particular purpose and fulfils it in a way which even you cannot explain,

But I have explained my logic, really over and over

dhw: 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.

The bolds above are exactly what I think. Your 'unfixed beliefs' lead you to imagine a very humanized God.