Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Monday, September 09, 2019, 08:35 (1901 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I have to use human words in describing God's thoughts. We don't have words just for God, and you know that.

dhw: I don’t know why you assume that your God’s thoughts cannot be described in human terms. You have no reason to suppose that his reasons for doing what he did are incomprehensible to humans.

DAVID: Not incomprehensible, but our analysis of God's thoughts are all guesses as to his actual thoughts.

Yes indeed, but your guess until now has been the fixed belief that he only had one purpose, decided to wait 3.X billion years before starting to fulfil it, and covered the time by specially designing anything but the one form he wanted/desired to design. And you cannot find any logical explanation for such a procedure, which makes it incomprehensible both to you and to me.

dhw: […] I don’t have him fretting. I have him wanting a bush and getting a bush. You had him wanting a human but having to make a bush because he’d decided to wait a few billion years, though you didn’t know why. A sort of bumbling, can’t-make-up-his-mind God – or a God that knew what he wanted but couldn’t work out how to do it.

DAVID: Your version of my God is bumbling, but that is because your view of my God is so garbled. My God knows exactly what he is doing and is full of purposeful creative activity, and chose to evolve humans. God's works tell us that.

If I believed in God, he would certainly know what he is doing and be full of purposeful activity, and since I believe evolution happened, I would agree that he “chose” to evolve humans, just as he chose to evolve every other multicellular organism that has ever lived on this planet. He only becomes bumbling when you insist that he specially designed every other multicellular organism although the only one he wanted to specially design was H. sapiens.

DAVID: God is my designer.

dhw: Perfectly understandable: he may have designed an autonomous mechanism instead of directly designing every life form, lifestyle, natural wonder, and let’s not forget bacterial responses to every situation they may encounter throughout life’s history.

DAVID: Forgetting my God is in charge and would have given such a mechanism guidelines.

Your “guidelines” have always meant nothing but preprogramming or direct dabbling – the direct opposite of autonomy. “Being in charge” is one of your weasel expressions. Your God would still have been “in charge” if he had decided to invent a mechanism that could make its own decisions (as you acknowledge with your firm belief in human free will). He could always intervene if he wanted to.

DAVID: Final thought: For weeks you have repeated the same complaint using a humanized concept of God, while I follow the well-accepted advice of Adler who is a philosopher of theology. Do you have any new thoughts?

dhw: No, but I’m delighted to see that you do, as is clear from your post under “Natural Wonders & Evolution”. We are making progress.

DAVID: Not so clear.

Well, you’re doing your best to muddy the waters again after you’d you cleared them in your post under “Natural Wonders & Evolution”.