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

by dhw, Monday, June 14, 2021, 14:43 (1256 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: How can past food supplies for past organisms that had no connection with humans have been essential for humans?

DAVID: I dodge nothing. Each early bush fed each early population. This current bush feeds us. Simple logic looking at a continuous evolutionary process from bacteria to us. Stop slicing!

But the evolutionary process did not lead solely from bacteria to us, and that is the problem you keep dodging! If all your God wanted was us, why did he specially design all the millions of life forms and food supplies that had nothing to do with us? Stop dodging!

dhw: 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: Again you have demonstrated an imaginary God fit to your doubts about Him.

Nothing whatsoever to do with my doubts about his existence, if that’s what you mean. Another of your dodges. You have agreed that my alternatives fit in with the history.

DAVID: My fixation is to analyze historical facts of God's works and accept what He did with purpose.

Of course what he did would have been with purpose. I would also expect the results to fit in with the purpose, and the result was thousands of millions of years of comings and goings, 99% of which had no connection with humans.

DAVID: My God know the outcome. We are here, very different than anything else ever appearing. Therefore we are an obvious goal. Adler's reasoning.

Again you say “an obvious goal”. That = one goal. What were the other goals? We are very similar in many ways to our animal ancestors, since so many of our basic physical components and instincts are the same, but yes, our minds are vastly superior. How does that come to mean that your God specially designed the brontosaurus because he wanted to specially design us?

DAVID: You are imagining an amorphous God.

“Amorphous” means having no shape or features. How can you possibly endow him with features and not associate him with human attributes? Why are enjoyment of creation, or experimentation, or the desire for a free-for-all “amorphous”? They are no more and no less amorphous or “humanized” than your theory of single-mindedness (only one purpose - humans), and a desire for total control.

DAVID: You can distort my version of God any way you wish, but I present a very purposeful God who keeps on His course, and you call Him a control freak.

I present a very purposeful God who 1) keeps on his course to allow a free-for-all, or 2) experiments to design a being like himself. Always purposeful, always on his course. Meanwhile, do you deny that you believe he wished to control the production of every life form, econiche, lifestyle, natural wonder etc.?

DAVID: Just because there are human control freaks doesn't make Him human.

Of course not. As you so rightly agreed previously, it is probable/possible that he has thought patterns and emotions and attributes similar to ours. That doesn’t mean he is a human being.

DAVID: And free will among all animals with a brain shows we are not automatons. He certainly lets us do our own thing.

Precisely. He was happy enough NOT to control our behaviour. And so, by analogy, I propose that he might also have been happy enough to give organisms the means to design their own adaptations, major and minor, not to mention their own lifestyles, strategies and natural wonders.

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?

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Beautiful description of a writer's imagination. Perhaps why I've never tried fiction. I would want a conceived endpoint to tie it all together. Explains our differences about our God's personality.

Why should what you want be what your God wants? When you read a book, do you want to know the end of the story before you start? Please answer. Perhaps he enjoys the excitement of DISCOVERY, just as I do when I’m writing. You offered the analogy, and I am explaining to you how it may well fit in with your God’s own thought patterns.