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

by dhw, Friday, January 21, 2022, 08:17 (1038 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have said they are not “mistakes” but are merely examples of free organisms designing their own way of surviving. Bacteria or deviant cells that kill us by feeding on us are no different from all the other life forms that survive by killing. Do you see all carnivores as “mistakes” your all-powerful God didn’t want but couldn’t correct?

DAVID: I'm referring to metabolic errors that can kill, while you remain off that point. God edited to prevent them.

dhw: And in some cases – despite being all-powerful – he failed to do so. The “metabolic errors” were included under “deviant cells”, and I am suggesting that the diseases that kill, like everything else that kills, are the result of the freedom of choice you have acknowledged as being part of your God’s system.

DAVID: Not freedom of choice, but molecules are free to make mistakes in folding, etc., since they are not tightly controlled in reactions by physical and electrical forces influencing them.

Call it whatever kind of freedom you like, I remain baffled by the concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who “has to” design a system containing errors which he does not want and which he is incapable of correcting. My idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing God is that he would design precisely the system he WANTS to design. Hence the freedom at all levels from micro to macro for cells and cell communities to change structures.

Importance of pathogens
dhw:. If accidents can cause your God to “change course”, then it is illogical to claim that he had planned everything in advance and was always in total control.

DAVID: He obviously planned for the great oxygenation event. But some events certainly seem at random like the course of each asteroid now flying around the solar system.

dhw: You can pick and choose as much as you like, but you cannot dispute the logic of my statement.

DAVID: I agree, God probably allowed chance events, and used them to continue with His plans.

Thank you. If Chixculub was an accident that wiped out the dinosaurs, does that mean he didn’t plan to wipe out the dinosaurs, and they would have continued to exist while he got on with his one and only goal of designing humans? I can't help wondering why he designed them in the first place, if all he wanted was us and our food! Or maybe the accident forced him to change our menu! I must say, though, I do like the idea of your God allowing for accidents, as it takes us right back to the enjoyable “unpredictability” of the free-for-all which would account for all the comings and goings of life forms with no connection to humans, which you yourself cannot explain.