Back to theodicy and David's theories (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 23, 2021, 16:39 (1367 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: With my theist hat on, I look at what he has created, and I assume as you do that he had a purpose. But I have no idea why, ... you regard the desire to create something interesting as beyond the “degree of humanizing” that is acceptable to you. I also wait to hear what purpose for life including humans you would regard as being within the degree of humanization acceptable to you.

God does not create out of any self-interest or to create interesting things or events. From Swinburne:

3:16: What’s the role of analogical language in theism?

RS: Humans cannot fully understand the nature of God, and so they have to use words whose normal meaning they understand, but which are not fully satisfactory for describing that nature. So there is a sense in which God is a “person”, that he has beliefs, thoughts and other conscious events; but also a sense in which God is not a person, in that his identity is constituted by his properties – such as omnipotence and perfect goodness, whereas the identity of all other persons is independent of the degree of their power and the morality of their actions.

My point is God has very little human in his personality

DAVID: He seems to me full of purposeful activity to create what He desires to create with no other motive than the creations themselves.

dhw: This is a sensational new development in your thinking. Until now you have been adamant that every creation was “part of the goal of evolving humans”, which makes no sense since 99% of extinct life forms (plus food supplies) had no connection with humans. Now apparently he simply desires to create whatever he creates, with no other motive.

DAVID: You keep straining for a change in my thinking. I always view that His final step was humans.

dhw: Nobody is going to deny that so far humans are the last species to have emerged. But what about all the other species unconnected with humans? Please explain what you meant by him having “no other motive than the creations themselves”.

Simply, He is a purposeful creator. using evolution from bacteria. We know He has created a being that recognizes Him, that has a very fruitful, very expanded lifestyle. That is obviously what He wanted to do. Does that give Him self-gratification? He has no need.

DAVID: The 99% extinct forms are simply a record of the passage of time in the development from 3.8 bya of small populations now becoming large present populations.

So your God had to directly design millions of irrelevant life forms to show that it took 3.8 billion years for him to design the only life form he wanted to design (plus food supply), and to show that all the irrelevant life forms made up smaller populations of irrelevant organisms than the larger populations of relevant organisms that we have today. Well, at least this makes a change from him having to design millions of generations of food supplies for humans to eat even though they weren’t there at the time.

DAVID: Your distortions of the required history make your humanizing approach unacceptable. Inconceivable, but conceivable, yes, if we make God quite human.

dhw: What distortions? History tells us that there were millions of life forms, now extinct, that had no connection with humans. You have no idea why your God would have designed them if his only purpose was to design humans. They did not provide a food supply for humans, but now you tell us that he had no other motive than the creations themselves. And it makes perfect sense - if we accept your belief that he is/was interested in them - that he might have designed them because he wanted to design something that would interest him, even if that makes him “quite human”. Better than trying to explain why he designed them even though they had no connection with what he wanted to design!

Evolution connects all forms through the passage of time. God evolved humans from bacteria. Done.