Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, August 15, 2022, 08:15 (829 days ago) @ David Turell

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.>

dhw: 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!

DAVID: Your psychoanalysis of me is wrong. My theories make sense to me, if not to you.

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

DAVID: I guess I'm happy and feel at home to illogical beliefs.

Thank you for this honest admission. I’ll note it for future reference whenever you claim that your illogical theories make sense to you!

DAVID: […] When we say God loves, His form of love is His personal form of love, and we cannot know how it resembles ours.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Back you go to humanizing God.

The second “e.g.” lists YOUR humanizations of your God at various times! But you can’t see that your guesses are just as humanizing as mine! And why not, since it is perfectly feasible that the creation could mirror aspects of the creator.

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: God did give cells some form change, but not speciation abilities.

How do you know?

Adler

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

dhw: 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.

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

DAVID: I'll stick with God's reasons for choosing to evolve us instead of directly creating us, are due to His own private reasons we cannot know. I'm sorry that fact disturbs you.

It is not even a fact that God exists, let alone that his one and only purpose was to create us and our food, or that in order to do so he created countless other life forms unconnected with us and our food, or that he created some species without precursors. You agree that your theories don’t make sense to you, so please stick to “feeling at home to illogical beliefs” and don’t pretend that they will make sense if I read Adler.