Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 09:57 (1703 days ago) @ David Turell

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

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

dhw: 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: Why can't God chose his methodology for producing humans? It is a reasonable suggestion and the choice fits the history.

Of course God chose his methodology, and the result is the evolution of billions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct, with humans the last so far. You yourself cannot see any logic behind the above monologue, and so you fall back on the absurd assumption that anything logical would be human (see below), and you know your God is not human and therefore we shouldn’t look for logic.

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.

dhw: Your usual digression. […]

DAVID: For me not a digression. You simply refuse to accept the philosophic importance of the development of our brain/consciousness.

I keep on acknowledging that our consciousness is special, but that does not mean your God designed 3.X billion years’ worth of life forms etc. for the sole purpose of designing us!

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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: You make my point in the bolded phrases. God does not think like a human as Adler shows. God chose to evolve humans and did what had to be done/relevant to follow that course. You cannot accept my non-human God.

Of course God is not human, but that does not automatically mean that he thinks in a way that is totally illogical by human standards of logic! According to you he “chose to evolve” (which you think means specially design by preprogramming or dabbling) humans and billions of other organisms as well. Why do you assume that he “had to” evolve (= preprogramme or dabble) the whale’s flipper, the monarch’s lifestyle and the duckbilled platypus if all he wanted to do was evolve/preprogramme/dabble H. sapiens? Ah, he had to do it because he doesn’t think like us! Well maybe he didn’t “have to” design them, but he wanted to design them for their own sake, or he gave them the means to design themselves because he chose to create the higgledy-piggledy bush of life. I fear you won’t make many converts to your theory if your only justification for its illogicality is that your God isn’t human.