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

by David Turell , Monday, June 14, 2021, 18:07 (1256 days ago) @ dhw

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!

dhw: 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!

No dodge. Tell us what we would eat if planted/created on Earth with nothing to eat?

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.

dhw: 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?

Another goal was food supply. The human goal was an endpoint of an evolutionary process which was created from one stage to the next, each stage supporte4d by ecosystems of food supply.

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.

dhw: 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.?

I won't deny my vision of a very purposeful God who knows exactly what He is doing on teh way to His goals.

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

dhw: 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.

Your form of God, not mine.

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.

dhw: 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.

Of course not, I don't read the last chapter first.

dhw: 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.

My version of God knows exactly what He is doing and where He is going. Again your humanized version appears. Why do you want Him so human He mirrors us? His person is not in any way like ours