More Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Saturday, May 04, 2024, 18:54 (201 days ago) @ dhw

Enjoyment, boredom and theodicy.

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.

dhw: 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.)

What I bolded is the problem you are blinded to. We cannot know if any of the terms we use apply to God is any sense. Our meanings may not be God's!!!

"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.

dhw: 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.

Still blind. Yes, the word themselves are not allegories, but when emotions are needed as descriptive terms, our words become allegorically used. Does God need or wish to be worshipped? All we can accept is maybe.

Aquatic spiders

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.

dhw; 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.

Each adaptation must be studied for complexity. If very complex God designed it.

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.

dhw: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 99.9% extinct are the ancestors of the 0.1%c surviving now.

The role of B cells in cancer control

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

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

but I made my point. Down and dirty in the weeds is where progress in understanding happens.