Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, July 31, 2019, 12:16 (1940 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your confused response continues to ignore the importance of my first assumption that God chose to evolve humans from bacteria. Start with that assumption and the rest must follow. You obviously don't accept my first step. The rest of your objections are the result in which you deny that God should have been willing to spend the time involved. As for God's reasons as to His choice of method by evolving God, I'd remind you, God is concealed and all of his reasons and purposes are educated guesses.

YOUR VERSION OF YOUR GOD: “I am always in control, and my one and only purpose is to create H. sapiens, and therefore it follows that I have to start with bacteria, spend 3.5 billion years specially designing millions of non-human life forms, so they can eat or be eaten by one another, then start specially designing all kinds of hominins followed by all kinds of homos until I finally specially design H. sapiens. I have to do it this way because I choose to do it this way.”
I have proposed several alternatives to this illogical guess of yours (see below), all of which you agree make perfect sense. Your only objection is that all of them involve human attributes, although you cannot deny the possibility that your God might have such attributes! You do not need to keep reminding me that we are not “privy to his reasons” and that you have “no idea” why he would have chosen the utterly confusing combination of purpose and method you keep imposing on him.

DAVID (Under "Side effects of defense mechanisms"): Part of evolutionary relationships may simply be unintended consequences, which brings us back to God as an impersonal being, not actually caring about humans welfare.

dhw: Now you have your always-in-control God specially designing things that have consequences he didn’t intend, and his one and only purpose may have been to create something he doesn’t care about. Here are some different ideas: maybe he deliberately designed a mechanism whereby “evolutionary relationships” and indeed evolution itself had free rein, and maybe he enjoyed watching the fruits of his inventiveness, which would be no more “humanizing” than the all too human attribute of not caring about what happens to other beings. Or maybe he experimented (no more humanizing or out of control than “unintended consequences”) or maybe humans were a late addition to his thinking.

DAVID: Once again you have attacked my cardinal point that we cannot know if God cares about us. Invent God any way you wish, but the only basis in fact is that you imagined these possibilities.
And:
DAVID: Again simple: assume God chose to evolve sapiens, and the history of evolution tells us exactly what He did. Above, you guess at all the possible evolutionary mechanisms God might have employed. All sheer guesswork, with no factual basis. Just fruits of your very fertile brain. My rule is keep it simple and follow the known history.

We cannot know if he exists, let alone if he cares about us, and we cannot know his reasons for doing what he did. According to you, he “had to” do it your way, but he didn’t “have to” do it your way because he chose to do it your way and we don’t know why. Simple? At least my imaginings are logical and fit in with the known history, and of course I agree that they are all logical guesses or hypotheses, but unlike your own illogical guess/hypothesis, they are not a fixed belief.