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

by dhw, Saturday, June 12, 2021, 09:40 (1052 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] 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.

DAVID: 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.

There you go again! How can all the extinct branches of the giant bush of life over 3+ thousand million years have been individually designed, even partially, in order to provide food for humans who did not even exist at the time? You have already agreed umpteen times that past food supplies were for the past, not the present.

dhw: I challenge your complaint that my alternative theories depict an “amorphous” God who is not all-powerful and all-purposeful.

DAVID: 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.

And I have pointed out to you that a God who deliberately creates a free-for-all is just as purposeful as a God who only wants to design one life form (plus lunch) but designs millions of life forms (plus lunches) that have no connection with the only one he wants to design. You try to avoid telling us his possible purpose for designing us, and you kid yourself that you don’t endow him with human thought patterns, so you would really like your image of him to be “amorphous”! And although you agree that he enjoys creating, if I propose that his purpose might be to create something he will enjoy creating, you reject the idea. Perhaps not amorphous enough for you?

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

DAVID: 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.

You don’t seem to have grasped the point of the analogy. If God gave humans free will to act autonomously, it means he deliberately gave up control. We do our own thing. You object to the idea of an evolutionary free-for-all on the grounds that in your view, your God would not want to give up control of evolution. If he is willing to give up control of one life form (perhaps to see what behaviour we humans would come up with – who knows?), then why insist that he would not be willing to give up control over all life forms (perhaps to see what new forms they would come up with – who knows?). The principle of giving up control is the analogy.

DAVID: There you go again! When you've agreed to stop it [= repeating David’s illogical theory of evolution]

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.

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

But they should not distort the theories themselves: my theories and my logic are never an attempt to exclude God, the God I present is both powerful and purposeful, and terms such as weak, namby-pamby, wishy-washy etc. are an irrational denigration of my alternatives: a God who experiments, or a God who wants to create a free-for-all, will provide us – as you readily admit – with a logical explanation of the history of life as we know it.

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

That could be part of the attraction.

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?

DAVID: 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.

Experimentation is a perfectly normal way for inventors to achieve their purposes, so does that make them all confused and bumbling? Part of the joy of creation is also trying out new things. You can’t explain why your God designed billions of galaxies extinct and extant in order to produce one planet that could sustain life. At least experimentation will provide you with a possible explanation.