Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, August 14, 2022, 10:36 (830 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My belief is not a dodge, but analyzes in a way you do not. All of evolution is God's designs and all of those branches which did not lead to us created the huge food supply we need now.

dhw: So your God deliberately designed every single form of life and every econiche throughout 3.X billion years to lead either to us to our food bush, although “the current bush of food is NOW for humans NOW. There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms” and “extinct life [which formed the bushes of the past for the past] has no role in current time”. And you have no idea why your all-powerful, all-purposeful God was unable to design his only goal (us and our food) without all these countless precursors, even though apparently he was perfectly capable of designing species without precursors. And your theories make sense only to God, i.e. not to you.

DAVID: This statement of yours shows how strangely you view God. I view all-powerful, all-purposeful God as knowing exactly what He has to do and wishes to do to produce humans. And the current history of evolution is that exact result. You are simply second=guessing God with your human mind. I don't do that as I try to analyze God's works.>

I am not “second-guessing God”. I am looking at your human mind’s analysis of his works (if he exists), pointing out the illogicality of your analysis as summarized above, and reminding you of the fact that you yourself have said that these theories make sense only to God, which means they do not make sense to you!
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DAVID: Your psychoanalysis of me is wrong. My theories make sense to me, if not to you.

How can they possibly make sense to you if they make sense only to God?

DAVID: Constant misinterpretation. God's form of His own emotion of love may parallel ours but may not be exactly like our form. Samo old allegory approach, of course. And God knows exactly about our form of love. Why did you pose that question?

dhw: I want to know what you mean by “allegorical”. […]

DAVID: I have defined it. When we say God loves, His form of love is His personal form of love, and we cannot know how it resembles ours.

We can’t “know” anything about God, including his very existence. It is therefore plainly absurd to argue that he probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours, but they can’t possibly be like ours - e.g. enjoyment of experimenting, getting new ideas etc. - unless you approve of them - e.g. enjoyment of creating, interest in his creations, desire for recognition and for a relationship with us, although the first two of these apparently can’t possibly be part of his purpose for creating life.

dhw: You dismissed my proposal that God may have enabled cells to do their own designing as “secondhand” design, and called on your own experience as a designer (much better to do it yourself). Wouldn't you call this "humanizing", and why is is less humanizing than a God who enables organisms to do their own designing, just as he enables humans to do their own designing?

DAVID: Of course, God has human attributes, as shown by human purposes and God's purposes. We design at our level and He a this. Has any human created life? How could living cells change a form of life?

Thank you for once more agreeing that he has human attributes. So please stop dismissing logical theistic theories solely on the grounds that they “humanize” him. In answer to your questions: no human has created life. How does that come to mean that God could not have experimented, come up with new ideas, created a free-for-all? Still adopting a theistic approach, living cells could change their OWN forms if your God gave them the ability to do so.

Adler
DAVID: Adler's works are highly respected world-wide. He advised the Catholic Church as a philosopher of religion!!!

dhw: I am not discussing Adler’s importance. I am discussing your theories, which by your own admission “make sense only to God”. That means even Adler would not have understood them – and I doubt if he even knew about those we have been discussing on this thread, since you always emphasize that his work is dedicated to the importance of humans as evidence for the existence of God and does NOT cover those theories.

DAVID: Adler would agree God's reasons make sense to God but we are not privy to them.

So presumably Adler would agree that your theories of evolution, which do not make sense to you (they make sense ONLY to God), would not make sense to him either.

DAVID: He analyzes as I do. Without reading his instruction book "How to think about God", from my secondhand comments about him, your still know nothing about him. You have no knowledge how a philosopher of religion approaches the issue of thinking about God.

If you can’t find any sense in your own theories, please don’t try to defend them by giving me a reading list.