More Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Saturday, May 04, 2024, 07:59 (14 days ago) @ David Turell

Enjoyment, boredom and theodicy.

dhw: […] I don’t find it difficult to believe that the conscious being you call God might find eternity boring if he didn’t have anything other than himself to think about.

DAVID: The bold is a prime example of how you view God, as PRIMARILY HUMAN!

dhw: Where do you get “primarily” from? You said yourself that he would have found puppets boring. You think he wants us to worship him, is an inefficient designer, but enjoys creating and is interested in his creations. This does not make an eternal, immaterial, sourceless creator of universes and life “primarily” human!

DAVID: Same stubborn approach. I use those words exclusively, allegorically because we don't know God directly and humanizing Him is a giant NO NO.

Your proposal that your God might want us to worship him does not mean he is a human being. None of the above proposals – made by you – makes him a human being. And there is no allegory involved in any of them. Either he does or he doesn’t enjoy, want to avoid boredom, want us to worship him. You keep biting your own tail. (See the other thread.)

"Humanization"

DAVID: I attempt no humanizations of God.

dhw: This is your usual attempt to blank out statements you have made in the past. Enjoyment and interest, desire to be recognized and worshipped, inefficiency, powerlessness (can’t control the bugs), possibly/probably/certainly has thought patterns and emotions like ours...Why are you so afraid of your own “maybes”? Don’t you find it perfectly feasible that the creator should imbue his creations with some of his own attributes? Is it not possible that your God’s purpose in designing us was to create a being that would recognize him, commune with him, worship him, love him, be loved by him? Why do you solidly oppose the very explanations that you yourself have proposed in the past?

DAVID: All partially true, but since you use no sense of allegory for those words you humanized God.

As explained on the other thread, you know what you mean by those words, and they are not allegories. Either he does or he doesn’t want to be worshipped.

Aquatic spiders

DAVID: Obviously, you enjoy just-so stories. You just spouted a truism

dhw: A truism is something that is so obviously true that it doesn’t need to be said. So why do you call an obvious truth a “just-so story”? More self-contradictions!

DAVID: Just-so stories are presented as if truth, elephant trunk or giraffe neck origins as examples.

Why is it a just-so story that organisms might move elsewhere if they can’t find food or are in danger? You called it a truism. See above for the meaning of the word.

dhw: […] No one is suggesting that a change in the structure of certain cells is on a par with rocket science. You have agreed that cells are capable of minor autonomous adaptations. I don’t know where you draw the line between minor and major, but since the spiders are still spiders, I wouldn’t have thought these changes counted as major.

DAVID: Neither do I.

dhw: Oh! So why did you say God must have designed them?

DAVID: Misinterpretation. These spiders have designed attributes to fill their role in ecosystems.

We’re talking about the different ways in which they have adapted to life in the water. You said your God must have designed them, but if you think the changes were minor, then your God would not have needed to intervene.

DAVID: Life requires active ecosystems as the one the spiders are in.

dhw: Of course it does. But that doesn’t mean that all active ecosystems (not to mention the millions of extinct ecosystems) have been specially designed for humans.

DAVID: All for our use.

dhw: God designed lots of different aquatic spiders and every ecosystem for the last 3.8 billion years for our use? I hope you enjoy your trilobite soup and your dinosaur steak.

DAVID: What happened long ago makes our current result.

SOME of what happened long ago (approx. 0.1%) makes our current result. The rest, as you have agreed, did NOT lead to our current results.

The role of B cells in cancer control

DAVID: if your eyes glaze over reading all of this I'm not surprised.

I laughed out loud at your clairvoyance! Thank you for your understanding!