Evolution and humans: Neanderthal contributions (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 03, 2019, 09:42 (1907 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Once again you are complaining about a God who delayed His creation of humans. IF that isn't applying human logic to God's reasoning I don't know what is!

Once again I am not complaining about your God doing anything! I am complaining about your insistence on your own version of a purposeful, always-in-control God, who apparently had one single purpose (H. sapiens) which he deliberately did not even begin to fulfil for 3.X billion years. Yes indeed, I am applying human logic, which is the only logic I can apply. You prefer to assume that your God acts in a way which you yourself cannot understand, and you try to justify your own illogicality by telling us that your God’s logic is different from ours. Under “Panpsychism” you wrote: “For me God exists only at the quantum level […] This explains one of the reasons why I doubt our ability to reason as God does…..” So if an atheist argues that chance created life, and you insist that life is too complex not to have been designed by a designer, and therefore logically there must be a designer, he can turn round and say: “Oh, but quantum mechanics shows that human logic goes out of the window, so your silly human logic can’t be applied here.” Will you swallow that?

Dhw: […] what makes you think your God is incapable of “conjuring up cell communities (“committees”) with an ability equal to brain work”? Cells do brain work! But you cannot accept the possibility that your God created them to do brain work. You have to have him doing all the brain work for them.

DAVID: The designing part of our body requires neurons. Your cell communities are not. What we know is they can make epigenetic adaptations, nothing more.

Our cell communities are not what? Neurons are also cells! Of course cellular intelligence as the driving force of innovation is only a theory, but epigenetic adaptations also require intelligence, so the idea is an extension of something that can be observed. My theory is a logical alternative to your own, which is equally unproven.

DAVID: How do you know we have anything in common with God other than consciousness? And how does history prove that?

dhw: I don’t know anything. I simply object to your insisting that you know your God’s nature, purpose and method, and therefore you can reject alternative interpretations of his nature, purpose and method. You are the one with fixed beliefs!

DAVID: I don't know either, but you don't like my theories as much as I don't like yours.

I don’t like yours because, as you keep admitting and then denying, it defies all logic, whereas my various alternatives, by your own admission, are not only logical but also fit in with the history of life as we know it.

dhw: You have still not told us the difference between a goal and a single purpose. Please do so, as it is central to our disagreement.

DAVID: Goals and purposes are the same but the way you approach the argument is to strongly imply that my God was dominated by his desire for humans and foolishly took too much time to reach the evolution of humans. A complete distortion of my view of God, but a neat debating trick on your part.(dhw's bold)

dhw: The debating trick is yours. If your God’s one and only purpose or goal had been to design H. sapiens, then of course he would have been dominated by his desire for humans. And therefore it makes no sense to have a purposeful God focusing on anything but his one and only purpose. I do not for one second believe that your God would be “foolish”. The foolishness lies in your insistence on a reading of his mind which you yourself cannot understand. [/b] (David's bolds)

DAVID: Note the bolds. Again a humanized God blinded by desire.

The first bold is simply a repetition of the emotive words you have substituted for God’s one and only purpose. A purpose is the thing you want to do, and so you would have expected a single purpose to be the single thing you want to do. Why don’t you respond to the argument instead of setting up this silly straw man?

DAVID: Yes He is purposeful but He has His own rationality. I don't try to understand God's mind because we cannot, but we can have theories about why He created what He created, about which you and I disagree.

And your theory is that you DO understand his mind: he had one purpose, and although he is always in control, he decided not to fulfil it directly but to focus on designing anything but the one thing he wanted to design. You don’t know why, but you do know that God’s logic is different from yours and mine.