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

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 22, 2024, 18:49 (30 days ago) @ dhw

God and possible purposes

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.

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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.

I don't view them as contradictions.

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.

dhw: 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.

It is a likely proposition to say humans were His goal/purpose assuming as Adler did, that natural evolution could not have reasonably produced us.

99.9% v 0.1%

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.

dhw: 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.

The 0.1% surviving would not be here unless the 99.9% produced them.