David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, March 30, 2020, 13:45 (1697 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: As I've said many times, I can guess just as well as you can.

dhw: Apparently not, since you cannot provide and refuse to look for any rational explanation for the above guess.

DAVID: You have the ability to look back at all the many guesses I have politely given you in the past. Don't tell me I haven't guessed at God's reasons for you.

You have refused to guess why your God chose the method you impose on him for implementing the purpose you impose on him. You have consistently reiterated that you have no idea, that your theory is not illogical providing we do not apply human reasoning to the actual history, and you “cannot know or even try to know his reasoning behind the results I see.” The only guesses you have politely given me in the past are that your God may be interested in us, may want a relationship with us, may want us to admire his works, and may enjoy his works as a painter enjoys his paintings. None of these are an attempt to explain why, with his omnipotence and one-track-mindedness (H. sapiens is his only purpose), he chose to spend 3.X billion years not fulfilling his only purpose.

DAVID: Again, your so-called god backs off purposeful design and lets organisms do it themselves. Not very purposeful, but wishy-washy and humanoid.

dhw: Why do you think that creating interesting things is purposeless and wishy-washy? Humanoid? Why do you think a God whose thought patterns and emotions and attributes are probably similar to ours (your words, not mine) cannot possibly have thought patterns, emotions and attributes similar to ours?

DAVID: We can only know His logic is like ours. The bold is your humanizing. Adler specifically states God may not be interested or answer prayers. ("50/50")

According to you God’s logic is NOT like ours, you have not answered my question in bold, and I have no quarrel with Adler’s “may not” and his 50/50, so please stop hiding behind him and answer the above questions.

DAVID: I have politely given you 'guesses' about God's reasoning in the past and you have quoted them to argue against my views. I really can guess as much as you do, but it is difficult not to humanize God if you and I use human reasoning to guess why He chose to do what He did and how He seemed to accomplish His purposes.

dhw: I have used your ‘guesses’ to support my alternative views, not to argue against yours. Of course you and I can only use human reasoning, but your human guess concerning his purpose and his choice of method only makes sense if “if we do not apply human reasoning to the actual history.”

DAVID: The bold is your usual distortion of my statement out of context.

What possible distortion can there be, since you consistently tell us that you refuse to apply human reason to what you believe to have been your God’s purpose and method of achieving his purpose (= your theory of evolution)?

dhw: […] you have left out the factor that makes your fixed belief so illogical – namely, that he creates millions and millions of twigs for the sole purpose of creating one: 3) No one will deny our unusual mental capacity, but there is not one multicellular species in the whole of the evolutionary bush of which it could not be said that their existence or survival is/was not required as part of the previous bush, since bacteria have survived very well without any of their “descendants”.

DAVID: […] As for the size of the bush, it is fact. Really, how would you support the current 7.3 billion humans on a tiny bush? What is so illogical about your thinking is that the fact is humans arrived as the last stage of current life under God's control, and it is you using a human point of view wonder why God wasn't impatient and got right to us forthwith.

You argued that humans were not “required”, and my bold merely points out that NO multicellular species was “required”. End of that argument. Of course humans need a bush, but that does not explain why your God had to create 3.X billion years’ worth of bush and then destroy 99% of it when all he wanted was us and our bit of the bush. And no, I don’t wonder why God wasn’t impatient and didn’t get to us right away. I imagine God knowing exactly what he wanted. And so it is a logical conclusion that he wanted the whole bush, not just one twig or, if he really and truly only wanted one twig and didn’t produce it, then it is a logical conclusion that he was trying out different ways of getting it. And that is where you object that this “humanizes” God, although he probably has human thought patterns and “his logic is like ours”, and we mustn’t try to use our human reason to understand God’s choices, which in fact are your illogical interpretation of God’s choices.