Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell @, Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 19:03 (1661 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: My God is not incomprehensible to me, only to your humanized concept of God. My logical explanation of what happened is God chose to evolve humans, and didn't care about the time it took.

dhw: But according to you, evolve = specially design, and according to you he also chose to evolve (= specially design) every other life form, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life! And according to you, H. sapiens was his one and only goal, and you wrote: “Haven’t you realized by now, I have no idea why God chose to evolve humans over time?” – which I take to mean you have no idea why your God chose to spend 3.X billion years specially designing the bush before he specially designed H. sapiens. If you have no idea, I would suggest that this theory of yours is incomprehensible to you.

Of course I have no idea. God does what He desires and He has certainly done well by us. You want to understand God, and I know we can't. That is whny we differ.

DAVID: Further I have shown you that God has evolved everything He created, universe, Earth, life, and you have never commented on that point of evidence as to God's methods.

dhw: I have no quarrel at all with the theory that if God exists, he “evolved” all the above! My quarrel, for the umpteenth time, is with your theory that he did it all in order to produce H. sapiens! I much prefer your suggestion under “Natural Wonders & Evolution” that he “evolved” (which to you means specially designed) all the above, including the bush of life, which includes humans, to satisfy his wants and desires.

God knew what He desired when He began the process of evolution and knew he had to create the bush to support an energy supply while He took so many years to evolve us as the final point of His work.


dhw: In this context, and in relation to the two extinctions you have drawn our attention to today (for which many thanks), you wrote: “… obviously a very stable environment is of most importance, for life to survive. The Earth has many protecting feed-back cycles.” Again, one can’t help wondering whether your always-in-control God deliberately destroyed all those species and, if so why, according to you, he specially designed them all in the first place if his only goal was humans. Alternatively, he did not cause the extinctions, in which case he was not always in control. So did he or didn’t he control the environmental changes that triggered evolutionary change?

There were at least six mass extinctions according to my recent entry. God may well have used them to control the course of evolution. I view Him as totally in charge. The questions you ask about God have no answers that we can know to be true. Remember, God is purposely concealed, which bugs you as you can't know Him at a human level, and you want to. That desire in impossible to satisfy.


DAVID: Your version of my God is bumbling […]

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.

dhw: 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.

Free will is not the the same level as God running evolution. We can affect life on Earth by what we create on Earth, but we cannot evolve life as God does.


DAVID: No answer to my point God is always in full control.

dhw: No answer to my suggestion that he may have deliberately given up control in order to satisfy his wants and desires (as you acknowledge with your firm belief in human free will).

Our free will makes only local changes on Earth, so we cannot do what God does. The climate change worriers worry over nothing they can control.


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