A possible God's possible purpose and nature (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Wednesday, June 02, 2021, 13:20 (1062 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID (transferred from “Miscellany”): Again you return to suggesting God gave them [cells]inventive capacities. Your God-lite approach. […] my God is purposeful and direct, not your namby-pamby wishy-washy humanized form.

The image of God that I am proposing here is both purposeful and direct: his purpose is to create a free-for-all (not just one single species plus food supply), and his direct method is to design cells with the intelligence to work out their own means of survival. This fits in perfectly with the history of life as we know it. If you dismiss such a God as God-lite, namby-pamby and wishy-washy, you should perhaps examine your own values, especially bearing in mind that you believe he gave humans free will to work out their own means of survival.

Chaperones required
DAVID: The design of the origin of life required correcting chaperones and cochaperones from the very beginning. […] the design creation had to have had knowledge aforehand of the impending problem a life based on proteins must have. Therefore a mechanism of chaperoning and cochaperoning exists. Natural events do not have foresight. A designer is required.

dhw: […] you have no more idea than I have about what was present at the beginning. How do you know your designer didn’t design the chaperones when he found out that a life based on proteins WAS CAUSING problems? You will probably say he knows everything and is always in total control. Maybe he doesn’t and isn’t. Maybe he learns as he goes along. And maybe that even underlies his whole motive for and process of creating life.

DAVID: You are again imagining a weak God without knowledge of living biochemistry. In that case, how did He start life?

If he exists, he must have INVENTED living biochemistry. In keeping with your own belief that your God probably/possibly has thought patterns similar to ours, let me ask: Did humans say: “I wanner fly” and immediately come up with the winning formula? Why is it weak, namby-pamby and wishy-washy to experiment and learn new things? Why shouldn’t your God – who according to you had a wish to create - have set out on a project of creation that would lead him both to create and to learn something new, and why shouldn’t our conscious minds be a reflection of the mind of what you believe to be their creator? You are desperate to impose your own image of a God who knows everything, is always in control, has only one goal, always has good intentions...Where do you get these ideas from?

DAVID: And I've told you I do not know why the universe is so huge. It allows life to appear. Explanation requires more human research. What we can say it was God's [OBVIOUS] purpose to create life.

dhw: If God exists, then of course he would have created life on purpose. But you insist on going far, far beyond that obvious statement, and you “guess” the purpose (to create humans), the method (to design millions of life forms de novo that had nothing to do with humans), that your God is always in control, would not have wanted a free-for-all, must have had a “good” or “beneficial” reason for designing murderous bacteria and viruses, and would have designed all the billions of galaxies extant and extinct, lifeless or otherwise, in order to design humans or their like, but we mustn’t ask why because that involves guesswork!

DAVID: You are simply, unreasonably, questioning why reality exists as it is. My view is
God created all of it reasonably for His purposes.

dhw: If God exists, then of course he created all of it reasonably for his purposes. And now we are trying to work out what those purposes and his nature might be in the light of what he created. Above I have listed some of your guesses, and I am simply, reasonably, questioning the logic of those guesses.

DAVID: We've covered this: Humans are here, a result so unusual Adler uses it as proof of God. What we are is not necessary for natural survivability.

I have no quarrel with Adler's logic, and our dispute here is not over God’s existence but over your illogical concepts of his purpose, methods and nature, which you tell us are not covered by Adler.

DAVID: I've offered reasonable answers to your questions which your rigidly closed mind won't accept.

dhw: […] No, you have not offered reasonable answers. You can’t explain why, if your God’s purpose was to design you and me and our lunch, he would have created millions of life forms and lunches that had no connection with you and me.

DAVID: Silly, the bush provides our lunch to eat. Without it we starve. You are illogical.

That is the CURRENT bush, which – as you yourself pointed out with perfect logic, and as I have quoted ad nauseam – has no connection with PAST bushes. So why did he create PAST bushes to feed “extinct life” which, in your own words, “has no role in current time”?

dhw:... I have listed some of your guesses about his purpose, methods and nature, and your “reasonable answer” to my challenges is that God did it your way “reasonably for his purposes”. Maybe he did it another way for different purposes “which your rigidly closed mind won’t accept”.