Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Sunday, August 18, 2019, 12:08 (1706 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: To answer your question about creation, I view God's system of evolution as small stepwise advances, except the Cambrian, as history shows. I think the evolution of the Earth as the perfect planet to support life, which God also controlled, reached a point of an environmental status where the Cambrian Explosion was appropriate to happen. All shown by the known history.

This is a non-explanation! You are simply saying that whatever happened - the known history – shows that God specially designed it all because that is what happened!

dhw: Why can’t you imagine your God directly designing all these life forms because he wanted to design them for their own sake and not just as a means of passing time? Or designing them because he was experimenting? Or designing a mechanism that would come up with its own variations which he could “watch with interest” (you used that expression some time ago in one of your more open-minded moments)?

DAVID: That is your imagination about God, not mine. My God is very purposeful. He knew those designs were required interim goals to establish the necessary food supply to cover the time He knew He had decided to take.

I know it’s not your view of God. You imagine him saying to himself: “My one and only purpose is to design H. sapiens. I am in full control, and I have decided not to fulfil my one and only purpose for 3.X billion years, and so I will design billions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders first, so that all the life forms can eat or be eaten by one other until 3.X billion years have passed, and then I will design lots of hominins and homos before I design the only thing I want to design.” And PS: “Only David Turell shall understand the logic behind my divine thinking.”

dhw: […] If I believed in him, I would tend to believe that he wanted to specially design whatever he specially designed. (And that might include an inventive mechanism to produce the great bush of non-human life forms that preceded H. sapiens.)

DAVID: Of course He 'wanted to design' what He knew He had to design to evolve humans.

And there you go again: why did he “have to” design the whale’s flipper etc. in order to preprogramme or dabble the only thing he wanted to preprogramme or dabble. Oh, because he’d decided to wait 3.X billion years and “had to” fill in the time by getting them all to eat or be eaten by one another.

DAVID: You are still humanizing Him, as your imagination runs wild. I look at history and try not to extrapolate any unnecessary theories.

Why is it “necessary” to extrapolate the theory that your God “had to” create billions of non-human life forms etc. in order to fulfil his one and only purpose of designing H. sapiens?

DAVID: Simply, my God did what He had to do based on His decision of how to create by steps.

Except, according to you, when he created by giant leaps (the Cambrian). So his decision to specially design H. sapiens by small steps forced him into specially designing 3.X billion years’ worth of non-human life forms etc. before he specially designed H. sapiens in small steps. And this is logical. (Apologies for the repetition, but if you keep repeating the illogicality, I can only answer by repeating my objections.)

DAVID: All of those designed organisms were a part of his plan. My God was not the bumbling God you portray by referring to Him as designing "just as a means of passing time?"

No, he is the bumbling God who has only one goal but “has to” spend 3.X billion years not fulfilling it because he has specially designed a system which prevents him from doing what he wants to do until that time has passed.

DAVID: My in-charge God doesn't lollygag. Your complaint about Him taken all that time is simply your lack of viewing God as I do.

Of course. I don’t see him as a bumbler who creates a system that forces him not to do the only thing he wants to do. If I believed in him, I would see him as purposeful in all that he does, and I would believe that the ever changing bush of life was what he wanted, not merely a means of filling in time until he could fulfil his one and only purpose.

DAVID: The reason I have persisted in continuing this debate is your complaint that I am illogical in this concept of God using evolution.

Yes, my complaint is precisely the illogicality of an always-in-control God deliberately creating a system that forces him to design billions of life forms etc. before he can design the only life form he wants to design.

DAVID: What is illogical to me is your approach to imagining God and making Him quite human, which then you translate into I am illogical. Not at all. It is your own problem.

My attack on your logic has nothing whatsoever to do with the alternatives I offer. Your theory would be illogical even if I offered no alternatives.