Natures wonders: ants and other insects farm (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, May 25, 2020, 09:08 (1641 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The reason I always reject your God theory is the level of personality that I see for God.

dhw: I offer several levels because I do not have one “God theory”. You reject all my alternatives – including that of an all-powerful God who deliberately gives free rein to evolution – because you wish to stick rigidly to your one theory, despite the fact that you have no idea why your God’s all-powerful and all-controlling personality would lead him to pursue his one purpose by not pursuing his one purpose (designing us) before inexplicably pursuing other purposes (designing millions of non-human life forms, econiches, natural wonders etc.)

DAVID: This is your same inconsistent objection, ignoring the fact that God can chose what He wishes to do and he chose to evolve, because that follows history. i don't have to know His reasons, if I can find purpose, which I have with Adler.

Yet again: yes, we agree that if he exists, he chose evolution. Yet again, we are not talking about his reason for choosing evolution. Yet again, I have no objections to the reasoning behind your choice of his purpose (we are special). And yet again, you ignore the bold! And yet again you ignore a logical explanation for that bold: namely, if he started out with the sole purpose of creating a special being who has thought patterns, emotions and attributes similar to his own, perhaps he needed to experiment in order to get it. Or – another perfectly logical hypothesis – life itself was a great experiment, and he hit on the idea of such a being late on in the process. You reject these logical explanations of the ever changing bush of life on the grounds that this does not conform to your personal image of God.

DAVID: As with the bees attack on leaves, you have a marked predisposition to minimize the gap in mentation between any lesser animal and humans, always making us look less special. Review your bias.

The idea that such organisms might have their own form of intelligence does not minimize the gap between them and us. Yet again, the two hypotheses above highlight the specialness of humans. Please stop putting up this straw man attack on a non-existent bias when you know perfectly well that it is the bolded COMBINATION of beliefs that I am questioning.

dhw: a) since we can’t know God’s thoughts, there can be no such judgement as “God-lite”, b) he has just as much right to create a self-directing form of evolution as one that he preprogrammes or dabbles, and c) your insistence that he is all-powerful and in control of everything is no less “humanizing” that any of my alternatives, all of which allow for one or other of your basic premises, whereas neither of us can find a logical way of COMBINING them.

DAVID: I am judging your thoughts as God-lite as you create above a very humanized version of the God I see.

dhw: You have not answered any of my points.

DAVID: It all depends on how you judge God's personality. We are widely different and I doubt the gulf can be crossed, because you are definitely predisposed to minimize the mental difference we have. I am fully logical from my view of God and see how carefully He has evolved all of reality while you dwell just on life's evolution..

It is not a question of judging God’s personality, but of guessing what it is like. You have a fixed view that he is all-powerful and always in control. I do not minimize the difference of our mental capacity – see above – and if he exists, I totally accept evolution as the process by which he has created all of reality. The gulf between us arises solely out of your three rigid beliefs (all-powerful God + single purpose (us) + direct design of millions of life forms unrelated to us) as bolded above. Each of these rigid beliefs is reasonable in itself. It is the COMBINATION which makes no sense and which you constantly try to avoid by focusing on just one at a time.