Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Wednesday, September 11, 2019, 20:26 (1898 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: 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 why we differ.

dhw:But it is you who keep presenting a fixed view of God’s thoughts: “My one goal is to design H. sapiens. I have decided to spend 3.X billion years not designing him. Therefore I have to design lots of non-human life forms to provide a food supply until I have covered the time I have decided to take before I start designing lots of non-sapiens hominins and homos, finishing up with H. sapiens.” I merely offer an alternative version: “I want to create a vast variety of living forms, and so I shall invent a mechanism whereby organisms will reproduce, change themselves to fit in with a variety of conditions, and live and die in a continuously changing process.” You could even add: “And I like the idea of a special life form that will be able to think about me and itself and ask all sort of questions and make all sorts of inventions. I can always do a dabble if I feel like it, but let’s see what happens naturally.”

Why should your version of his thoughts, which you find incomprehensible, be more valid than mine, which fits in perfectly with the history of life as we know it?

Yes, you fit history in your humanizing approach to God's personality. My approach is very different as you know

dhw: (re mass extinctions:) 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?

DAVID: 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.

dhw: “Totally in charge” would have to mean he engineered every single environmental change that triggered every single new life form.

Since He created the universe and the Earth and evolved them, He may well have controlled all the environmental changes.

DAVID: The questions you ask about God have no answers that we can know to be true.

We all know that! We can’t even “know” if he exists!

DAVID: 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.

dhw: It needn’t stop us from distinguishing between logical and illogical speculations.

They become illogical if God is humanized, your constant approach.

DAVID: Free will is not 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.

dhw: I keep giving free will only as an example of your God giving up control.

My dog runs to the barn using his free will. God is not in control at that level. My walking to the barn by free will means God is not involved, but God is still fully in control of evolution! What God gave up is very minor, not the major point you are trying to make about degree of control of the universe, the Earth, and evolution.