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

by David Turell , Saturday, June 05, 2021, 14:49 (1265 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: All independent animals have free will to follow their wishes. We all know that. Why do you accuse me of not knowing that? I've offered guesses as to God's reasons. Why constant repetition seeking for more guesswork?

dhw: You know perfectly well that I am using human free will as an example of your God deliberately giving up control of his creations. The analogy is with him giving up control over the evolution of species, not with your dog deciding to pee on your carpet.

I don't accept that God ever gave up any control over evolution. I've never understood your point that God gave evolving organisms the ability to do their own evolving. Why remove God a step away?

Chaperones required
DAVID: As above we each have our own positions on God's personality.

dhw: Mine are fluid, yours is fixed. Now please tell us how his works disprove my suggestions and prove that your own “humanized” image of him is correct.

DAVID: I don't consider my fixed view of God as having Him mimic a humanized form. Your so-called fluidity is exactly how you humanize Him as His desires wander all over the place.

dhw: You have it the wrong way round. It is we who would “mimic” God. Hence the biblical idea that God made man in his own image. It’s my views (not God) that are fluid, because I offer different theories. But each theory on its own offers a God with a definite “desire”. One possibility is the one you believe in, which is to create beings with rich minds (two of your “guesses” were that he might want us to admire his work and to form a relationship with him) – although you can’t believe that our rich minds could be in any way like his. But if this was his one and only goal, perhaps the reason for his designing all those unconnected life forms was that he was experimenting. Just one way of explaining what you can’t explain. “Fluid”? “Wandering all over the place”?

Do you think God experimented to create a fine-tuned-for-life universe or experimented to find a way for life to appear? My God knows exactly how to create whatever He wishes.

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.

dhw: 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”?

DAVID: Again spliced up evolution. Bushes of the past fed organisms of the past. Pure logic.

dhw: Thank you for recognizing the obvious absurdity of your theory...SEE BOLD ABOVE.

DAVID: You needn't repeat your discontinuous slicing and dicing of a continuous evolutionary process which I believe was/is run by God's design.

dhw: If you tell us that over millions of years, your God specially created millions of life forms and lunches that had no connection with us, and he did so because we would have starved without them, I’m afraid you must expect me to point out that there is a slight problem of logic in your thinking.

DAVID: I think all of evolution has a connection to us. You are the evolution slicer and dicer. We both admit we came from ancestor Archaea.

dhw: How does that come to mean that your God designed the brontosaurus and his lunch “as part of the goal of evolving [= designing] humans”?

The "human complaints" post has now shrunk to the same problem, which you simply continue to dodge.

I don't dodge as you illogically respond to my points.