Natures wonders: ants and other insects farm (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, May 25, 2020, 15:19 (1641 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

You have hit exactly on the difference between us. Your very imagined humanized god is not my God in so many ways. The bolds show a God who is not sure of what He is doing and working it out as He goes. This defies all reason as I look at His creation of the universe, of the perfect Earth for life, starting complex life, and directing an ever-advancing evolutionary complexity to reach us. The last bold above ignores the advancing complexity which shows directionality of purpose. What I see is the vast difference. For you my God is unimaginable, and illogical. That is your lone perspective.

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..

dhw: 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.

It makes no sense to you as I describe above with you fixed mamby- pamby unsure of himself god. The two bolds show your confusion. First, you accept evolution by God and then below tell us the common descent is unrelated to us!