Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Saturday, August 31, 2019, 08:51 (1910 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Again you deny my concept of a purposeful God who knew his goal and the steps needed along the way.

dhw: I do not deny your view of a purposeful God! I deny your view that your God only had one purpose (to create H. sapiens) and that he decided to wait 3.X billion years before fulfilling his one purpose and therefore had to design billions of other life forms etc. to eat or be eaten by one another until the time he had decided to wait had been “covered”. (David’s bold)

DAVID: The bold is your constant distortion. A goal requires achieving that goal. God chose to evolve humans as history shows, which is why your implication that He should have immediately performed a direct creation of humans is so strange.

No distortion (see "Evolution and humans"), and you have omitted your version of evolution! According to you, despite your bolding above, God’s only goal WAS H. sapiens and evolution means specially designing every life form etc. that ever existed. So he decided not to design his only goal for 3.X billion years and therefore had to design all the rest to eat or be eaten by one another until he started designing all the different hominins and homos which eventually merged into H. sapiens. Now THAT is what I call strange. Logic suggests that an always-in-control designer with a single goal would indeed focus all his powers on designing the one thing he wanted to design. You explain this by telling us that your God has no human attributes and his logic is not the same as human logic. How do you know?

DAVID: I know it from faith developed from study of the facts we know.

dhw: What possible known facts can lead to the faith that your unknowable God is in total control, has no human attributes, and does not think or work in ways that conform to human logic?

DAVID: The fact is simple. We do not know a concealed God. What we presume about him is taken on faith, based on His observable works.
Followed by:
God is concealed. Any assessment of His logic is guesswork. The God you attempt to present is totally humanized

So your faith that he has no human attributes, and thinks and works in ways that do not conform to human logic, is guesswork. Any attempt to find a different and logical explanation of his goal and method based on his observable works (the history of life) is also guesswork but has to be dismissed, because your own guesswork is that he does not think or work in any way that can be explained by human logic. This is like a dog chasing its tail. I’m afraid I don’t see why any human would want to have faith in a guess which they themselves find illogical (you have no idea why he chose the evolutionary method you attribute to him) on the grounds that they have faith in the guess that God’s logic is incomprehensible to humans.