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

by dhw, Sunday, June 13, 2021, 10:57 (1050 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: There you go again, chopping evolution into unrelated time segments.

There you go again, dodging the issue. How can past food supplies for past organisms that had no connection with humans have been essential for humans?

dhw: 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: And my complaint is your weak analogy. Purposeful design to reach a goal is very different than designing most animals and us who then act on their/our own.

Let me put the above parentheses to you again. Hypothetical purpose based on your belief that God gave man free will:
GOD: Let’s see what intelligent human beings will do if I give them the freedom to behave as they like.
Hypothetical purpose based on my proposal of cellular intelligence:
GOD: Let’s see what life forms cells will produce if I give them the means to do their own designing.
In both cases, your God deliberately gives up control. I know you don’t believe it, but that is because you have a fixed idea of what your God wanted and did. My suggestion that he wanted a free-for-all, and therefore created a free-for-all, fits in perfectly with the history of life, with all its higgledy-piggledy comings and goings.

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

dhw: 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 complete distortion of my objection to your God. Let's call it a dodge. Note the bold. I have repeatedly told you I think you theories are logical only if a humanized God is accepted as the source.

And I have repeatedly told you that the God of my theories is no more humanized than your own.

DAVID: The terms I use about your form of God describes my impression of your form of God. You call mine a control freak! I can't use the approach but you can. OK?

Not OK! It’s the other way round! You dismiss my alternative theories on the grounds that although they are logical, they “humanize” God. I then point out that your own theories also “humanize” God (hence the “control freak”) but are illogical. (See also “Miscellany”.) As for distortion, you call the God of my theories purposeless, but he simply has a different purpose from yours. I also propose that he is powerful. However, he is willing to experiment and to learn new things – hardly what any of us would call “weak”, “namby-pamby”, “confused” and “bumbling”.

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

dhw: That could be part of the attraction.

DAVID: To a purposeless God. So you wrote your plays with no known ending to tie it together?

You clearly have little grasp of the creative processes. The analogy is far better than you think. When I start to write a play or a story, I normally have no idea how it will end. Part of the fascination of the whole creative process is finding out where it will lead. Perhaps this is one of those “thought patterns” you have said we probably/possibly share with God.