Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 11:37 (1702 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have always accepted the logic of your design argument. But “God chose evolution” does not have to mean that he designed every life form individually, and the whole problem arises when you insist that he did so for 3.X billion years in order to make them all eat or be eaten by one another until he could fulfil his one and only purpose of designing H. sapiens. You continue to split your theory up into acceptable snippets, whereas is it the COMBINATION of your fixed beliefs that makes no sense.

DAVID: Your denial that God designed all the organisms in evolution is simply non-acceptance of my theory about God and what He does.

The above means non-acceptance of your combined theories about your God’s intentions and methods!

DAVID: As for the bolded sentence, it is quite clear to me, if not to you, a food supply most be provided for all those years of evolution.

For all those years in which for some unknown reason he said to himself: “I only want to design H. sapiens, but I’ve decided to spend 3.X billion years not designing him, so I have to design lots of other organisms for a food supply to cover the time.”

DAVID: And you continue to ignore Adler's point of how special we are, as the prime clue to God's thinking. Please my entry of an Adler review today.

Your usual digression. I have never ignored it. I keep acknowledging that with our advanced degree of consciousness, we are special. But that does not mean your God’s one and only purpose was to produce us, and so he “had to” design every other life form for food until he designed the only thing he wanted to design.

DAVID: My God is purposeful and does not invent tasks just to fill time.

dhw: You wrote: “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.” If that isn’t “filling in time”, I don’t know what is. My God would also be purposeful, and if he did invent something, it would not be for the purpose of filling in time until he could design the only thing he wanted to design.

DAVID: It is not filling time if the food supply is definitely required.

Required by whom for what? He had decided to take 3.X billion years to design the only thing he wanted to design, and so he had to design every other life form to cover the time he had decided to take, but cover the time does not mean filling in the time?!

DAVID: Same old problem. Your humanization of God demands that He should impatiently jump to His goal. Your view of God.

dhw: Your humanization of God demands that instead of fulfilling his one and only goal, he decides to take 3.X billion years to even start the process, and so he “has to” give himself the task of inventing all the other organisms. He is a veritable Hamlet of the Heavens: doing anything except - according to the goal you impose on him – the one thing he ought to be doing!

DAVID: Once again you describe a bumbling Hamlet-like God who is simply drifting along, when He should think like a purpose-filled human and get the job done.

It is you who have him bumbling along! He only wants one thing, but decides to delay doing it for 3.X billion years and so has to do something else to cover the time! Why do you think a purposeful, always-in-control God would delay fulfilling his one and only purpose? Your new answer: because if he did, he would be thinking like a human!

DAVID: I take care not to humanize Him. I try to explain Him by His works and nothing else, as espoused by Karen Johnson in her book, The History of God.

If you come up with an explanation that makes him fully in control, purposeful, and with one purpose only, but not fulfilling his purpose until he has performed countless actions irrelevant to his purpose, you are suggesting that his logic is incomprehensible to humans, which includes you, and that is justified because any logic that you can understand would mean humanizing him! Why are you so certain that your God thinks of fulfilling his purpose in a way that defies all human logic?