David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, December 28, 2019, 11:10 (1790 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] some theories are more logical than others.

DAVID: It depends on the God one envisions. My God is highly purposeful and does not require experimentation as your humanized God seems to require.

My God, if he exists, is totally purposeful, and if he had just one purpose (to create H. sapiens) and knew exactly how to do it, he would have done it instead of inexplicably deciding not to do it for 3.X billion years. Experimentation is one of the logical alternatives I offer to your own illogical theory. I see nothing wrong with the idea that a God who created everything “very well could think like us” (your words).

DAVID: You are totally confused. Our universe is fine-tuned for life, not just this galaxy, which is specially designed by absorbing many small local galaxies to allow for enough size to put the Earth in a very safe position.

“You are totally confused.” We don’t even know the extent of “our universe”, but as far as we know, it has existed for approx. 13.8 billion years, so are you telling me that every single extinct galaxy and solar system over approx. 9.2 billion years was specially designed just to produce one planet capable of sustaining life so that your God could specially design you and me?

DAVID: Again fully humanizing. The Milky Way took time to be properly formed. I view God as knowing exactly what He was doing. Your imagined God's personality is weird.

Why “fully”? I’m not arguing that your God is an old man with a white beard who eats chocolate, picks his nose, and is frightened of the dark. Your idea of a “fully humanized” God really is weird. My proposal is that a conscious mind needs to be occupied – otherwise, what is there for it to be conscious of other than itself? And if it is immaterial but created materials out of its energy, it must have had a purpose. But 13.8 billion years of cosmic comings and goings, and 3.8 billion years of organic comings and goings do not, for me, suggest a conscious mind with just the one purpose of producing a single life form and with all the knowledge necessary to do so.

DAVID: The Cambrian required a powerful clear-thinking designing mind, not cell committees. It is easier to do the design than teach the cells how to design.

dhw: So do you think your God either preprogrammed or personally taught every inventor how to create every machine, book, strategy that was ever devised? No, you firmly believe that he gave humans the autonomous intelligence to do their own designing. And yet you do not accept the POSSIBILITY that he might have given cells/cell communities sufficient autonomous intelligence to control and change their own bodies in accordance with the needs or opportunities provided by an ever changing environment.

DAVID: Sure He could, with guidelines, but that is the long way around. My God is much more direct and purposeful than your mamby-pamby humanized God. The overriding problem is how one imagines God's personality to be.

Back you go to your “guidelines”, which mean a 3.8-billion-year-old set of instructions for every single undabbled innovation, econiche, lifestyle etc. I love your “long way around”, when you keep telling us that his only purpose was us, but he decided to specially design 3.X billion years’ worth of non-human life forms etc. before even starting on his meandering H. sapiens programme. There is nothing namby-pamby or non-purposeful about a God who experiments to obtain a particular goal, or who sets in motion a process that will yield billions of years’ worth of fascinating and even unpredictable results (e.g. human conduct, which you believe is the result of your God’s decision to give humans free will). But I agree, the problem is how one imagines God’s personality to be – and your fixed belief in your illogical theory is certainly no more valid than the various alternatives I have offered and which you agree are all perfectly logical!