Return to David's theory of evolution, theodicy and purposes (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 22, 2024, 12:18 (30 days ago) @ David Turell

God and possible purposes

DAVID: Why must he have a reason? It is part of your humanizing God.

dhw: Please note that the word “reason” is synonymous with “purpose” here. (If you have a purpose for your action, that is the reason why you perform your action.

DAVID: No. A purpose requires an initial reason for it!

Purpose: “the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists” (Oxford). When you say that your God’s purpose for creating the universe was to design us and our food, you mean the reason for which your God designed the universe was to design us and our food. Stop playing silly language games.

DAVID: We see humans as an unexpected endpoint of natural evolution. Assuming God as designer then humans were His purpose.

dhw: 1) “Why must he have a reason/purpose?” 2) “Humans were His purpose/reason.” […] Clearly you haven’t realized that this is a contradiction. You suggest that he doesn’t need a purpose, and then you tell us what his purpose was!

DAVID: Crazy! We have discussed His reasons for His purpose for years.

And you have just suggested that he may have no purpose at all, but his purpose was humans. Crazy indeed!

dhw: If my search for purpose is “humanizing”, why isn’t yours?

DAVID: Your God expresses humanizing wishes constantly. My God is not human in any way.

I have quoted a whole list of your humanizations (summarized again below), all of which I find plausible.

dhw: As for “humanizing”, at one moment your God probably or possibly has human-like thought patterns , and the next he is not human “in any way”.

DAVID: Previous discussions taken out of today's context . My thoughts about God change in these discussions. I consider it growth. You stay unchanged in position.

The context is always the same: if God exists, what are his possible purposes? Your thoughts change even within a single post, as illustrated above: God may not have had any purpose at all, but his purpose was to create us. I’m delighted to hear that your thoughts change. Long may they continue to change, until at last you stop contradicting yourself.

dhw: All of this is in reply to the silly accusation made at the start of this post. According to you, your God didn’t have to have a purpose or reason for creating life, but all the purposes we have listed are possible, except that mine are impossible. Yours are as “humanizing” as mine, but mine are wrong because they are “humanizing”. In the hope of clarification, I asked if you believed your God was purposeful (see below), but you didn’t answer. Maybe you’ll answer now?

DAVID: Yes, but His creations are selfless as previously discussed.

You claimed that your God was selfless, and so you rejected all the purposes you had proposed for his creation of life and humans: enjoyment and interest, desire for a relationship, desire to be recognized and worshipped. (Every Christian, Jewish and Muslim worshipper has got it wrong! Pull down the churches, synagogues and mosques!) Then you came up with the idea that he might have had no purpose at all, but his purpose to create us.

99.9% v 0.1%

dhw: […] you still refuse to acknowledge the utter absurdity of having 99.9% of dead species “producing” (= being the mummies and daddies of) the 0.1% survivors (their supposed “progeny”). 99 different species of dinosaur gave birth to an archaeopteryx!

DAVID: Evolution has a past which becomes the present. Keep it a continuum.

dhw: Yet again: only 0.1% of the past leads to the present. The 0.1% is the continuum. The 99.9% were dead ends. How many more times:
dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all the creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From 0.1% surviving.

dhw: Did you really not know that every creature that ever lived included those that lived in the past?

DAVID: All of the 99.9%c extinct created the current 0.1% surviving. A 100% total.

99.9% extinct plus 0.1% surviving = 100%. It does not = 99.9% extinct were the mummies and daddies of the 0.1% surviving. Please stop this nonsense.