Return to David's theory of evolution PARTS 1 & 2 (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, February 19, 2022, 07:13 (1006 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God knew we would have emotions, thoughts and logic, but we cannot be sure how similar they are to His.

dhw: We cannot even be sure that he exists, but these discussions centre on his possible nature, purposes and methods if he does exist. I find it hard to conceive of a God who creates a being with emotions, thoughts and logic he himself never experienced. In particular, I’m interested in your own belief that he enjoys creating and is interested in what he creates. And now that at last we have rid ourselves of your theory that humans were your God’s one and only purpose, we can consider other possible purposes.

DAVID: God is not like us. You agree, so any speculations about His personality and how He may or may not experience emotions is just that. Of course He knows our emotions. Of course He is logical. He could not be otherwise.

Even God’s existence is a speculation, let alone his nature and purposes. But since he is logical, and since you are sure he enjoys creating and is interested in what he creates, I have offered the following:
dhw: Indeed his purpose right from the start might have been to create an ever-changing world of life which he could watch with interest – the most interesting of all being human beings. Perhaps we are heading towards a theistic theory that makes sense?

DAVID: Now you make sense. You have repeated my guesses about God and His purposes with humans as an endpoint.

dhw: This is good news. At a stroke, we have settled a dispute that has gone on for years. Truly a red-letter day in the history of the Agnostic Web. Still assuming the existence of your God, we can now move on to discussing how he might have handled evolution.

DAVID: We have had many discussion about evolution. God designs as He wishes to advance his purposes.

Agreed. And now that we have plural purposes instead of just one, and it makes sense to you that he might have created life because he enjoyed creating something he could be interested in, and it also makes sense to you that your God is logical and may have thought patterns and emotions similar to ours, we can examine different theistic theories to explain the course of evolution. I will come back another time to my own alternatives (already well known to you), but first I’d like to go back to your two theories of preprogramming and dabbling. I’m not dismissing them, but, taking one of our favourite examples...
dhw: I asked you how you think he did it. Specifically: did he provide the first cells 3.8 billion years ago with a programme for whales’ deep sea diving, or did he pop in one night and perform an operation on a few whales to engineer the necessary “phenotypic changes”?

Please explain why you consider this question to be “facetious”.