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

by David Turell , Friday, June 11, 2021, 19:49 (1052 days ago) @ dhw

Evolution of the universe(transferred from “Miscellany”)

DAVID: Your view of God is not mine. If God has purposes for evolutionary advances, of course allowing organisms to do their own designs won't fit His goals and are secondhand.

dhw: Same again, but let’s pin it down to your actual belief: you think your God’s only purpose was to create humans and their lunch. And so “of course allowing organisms to do their own designs” would not fit his goal (singular). And that is what makes nonsense of your theory, because you cannot explain why a God whose only purpose was to design humans and their lunch should have designed millions of life forms and lunches that had no connection with humans and their lunch! So either his purpose was not to design humans etc., or he did not design the millions of life forms etc. which had no connection with humans etc.

Same simple, same again response. My God chose to evolve us from bacteria and did so by creating the giant bush of life we see, partially to give an expected huge human population a proper food supply, all logical from a belief standpoint.

DAVID: Most God-believing folks view Him as all powerful, all knowing, past present and future, all purposeful, etc. You always weaken and modify and make Him amorphous.

dhw: I don’t know why you are kow-towing to “most God-believing folks” when you pride yourself on your rejection of conventional religion, but in any case the image I have offered you above still has him as all-powerful and all purposeful, but deliberately creating something that he does not wish to control (as you accept when you insist that he gave humans free will). And I thought your objections were to the possible “human” thought patterns this image entails, which is the exact opposite of “amorphous”. It’s you who object to solid characteristics – though only when they differ from those you attribute to your God (e.g. he always has good intentions).

DAVID: Our free will is not in any way equivalent to designing de novo forms in evolution.

dhw: Dealt with above. As usual you dodge all my main points.

DAVID: Your tired 'dodge' complaint again. Our free will cannot be compared to tight design control of evolution itself. I can certainly complain about your poor comparison.

dhw: The dodge is the fact that you have picked on free will (a parenthesis) and ignored the rest of my post, in which I challenge your complaint that my alternative theories depict an “amorphous” God who is not all-powerful and all-purposeful.

Your amorphous God is exactly how He appears to me, when compared to the purposeful God I envision. That is not a dodge. You've had that answer many times.

dhw: As regards free will, as you know perfectly well, the analogy concerns your God’s willingness to give up control.

Control over design of new structure is vastly different than human free will being allowed, all structures now designed with it present. Material vs. immaterial.

DAVID: There you go again! When you've agreed to stop it.

dhw: It is impossible to stop it when you continuously try to make out that your view of God's purpose and method (i.e. your theory of evolution) is logical, and you then distort and denigrate the alternative theories that I propose.

In any debate the opponents certainly discount alternative theories and sow how they are distortions or unreasonable extrapolations of known facts

dhw: As for my alternatives, experimentation is only one of them, and I have no idea why you should think that experimentation and willingness to try out and to learn new things denotes lack of self-confidence.

DAVID: My God knows exactly what He wants to accomplish and has done it. Quite an obvious comparison.

dhw: A God who wanted a free-for-all knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish and did it.

A God who uses a free-for-all has no idea of the ensuing endpoint.

dhw: Alternatively, if his aim was to produce a particular life form that had never existed before, why do you think it denotes personal insecurity if he tries different ways of producing the novelty?

Once again a God who doesn't know how to achieve His purposes. Do you think He experimented before finding a form of universe fine-tuned for life? Why not just present your God as confused and bumbling? That is no distortion of what you attempt to present about God's personage.