More "miscellany" (General)

by dhw, Monday, November 01, 2021, 11:07 (878 days ago) @ David Turell

Cosmologic philosophy: dhw said once universe too big
DAVID: My view of God's personality makes my theories entirely logical.

dhw: Do please tell us exactly what is your view of your God’s “personality”, as it seems to vary from month to month.

DAVID: I'll simply repeat my constant view of His personality: Purposeful with active goals achieved in full control. As shown by the history He created. Logical in His own way. Loving? Clearly aware of probable errors in life's system He created.

dhw: “Purposeful” agreed. Active goals? Why plural? You refuse to contemplate any goal beyond the design of humans plus food.

DAVID: I know your humanizing goals for your form of God. I view humans as His endpoint of creation.

And you are trying to replace the word “goal” with the word “endpoint”, which could simply mean that we are the last item on his creative agenda, as opposed to being his one and only goal from the very beginning – the claim which lies at the heart of one of our disputes since it clashes with your belief that he also specially designed lots and lots of extinct species that had no connection with humans.

dhw: Full control clashes with your belief that he had no choice other than a life system he could not control.

DAVID: He chose to design the only system that would work.

Even that presumption means he is not in full control.

dhw: If you mean full control of evolution, you offer the absurdity of his having one goal which he deliberately did not fulfil until he’d designed countless life forms that had no connection with his goal.

DAVID: Your invented absurdity clashes with your admitted 'God can chose whatever He wishes to do.'

You can’t explain the logic, and so I propose that your theory is less likely to have been what he chose than other theories which you agree make perfect sense.

DAVID: The Gods we each imagine are vastly different as shown by what you have your version of God doing: experimenting, spectating, handing off secondhand designing, allowing free-for-all evolution, no goal in sight. Doesn't explain us in any way.

dhw: The goal in all these would be enjoyment of and interest in the creation of life outside himself. That explains the ever-changing history of life on earth. Experimentation and/or new ideas are alternatives to explain the specialness of humans while at the same time explaining all the other life forms that had no connection with humans.

DAVID: Again, not recognizing we need all those forms in ecosystems for food/energy or life stops. The current human population has become predictably enormous and God's designed bush of life provides for it.

Yes, life stops if there is no food. How does that explain why he designed countless forms of life/food that had no connection with humans, if all he wanted to design was humans and their food? You never stop dodging!

The obstetric dilemma
dhw: Not on their own. There would have to be a process of change and response to change. The cell communities involved in the pelvis would have to respond to the changes in the baby, which in turn would have been inherited from changes in the adults. No doubt there would have been many problems and deaths before the new pelvis was fully established, but I must confess I find this process more convincing than that of the first ever cells being given a programme for pelvis restructuring, along with every other evolutionary development, or your God popping in to perform operations on a group of pregnant females after having fiddled around with all the different fathers’ sperms.

DAVID: You continue to deny design while obvious design keeps you agnostic. Conflicted, I would say.

You simply cannot grasp the fact that cellular intelligence is a theory of design, and it does not exclude your God as the possible designer of the intelligent cell. It simply provides an alternative to your 3.8-billion-year-old programme for every single evolutionary development and decision for the whole history of life, or your God constantly popping in to perform operations on each and every individual organism he wants to change.


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