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

by David Turell , Thursday, October 31, 2024, 19:15 (6 hours, 16 minutes ago) @ dhw

God and possible purposes

dhw: Our subject is God’s possible purposes. What is the difference between “God’s only purpose for creating life was to create humans” and “God’s only reason for creating life was to create humans?” Please stop these silly language games.

It is your game. You have substituted the two words properly. I am using a different approach wondering what specific reason in God's mind made Him want to create humans. There must be an underlying reason for the wish to create us. Your approach avoids that question.

DAVID: I follow the guideline that God is not human in any way.

dhw: But you also believe that all our “humanizing” proposals, including God’s love for us, are possible, although they are not possible. Hence your self-diagnosed schizophrenia.

DAVID: Not 'not possible'. but we simply do not know and factually cannot support any conclusion.

dhw: Agreed, and that applies even to God’s existence. But if you believe it’s possible that God loves us, you are not following the guideline that God “is not human in any way”.

God's love is a human wish and disturbs me since God is not human. Remember Adler's use of allegorical meanings to solve your problems.

DAVID: You are constantly upset when I protect a God 'not human in any way'. Why must God have any human attributes? What religions describe about God are all human wishes and you support them.

dhw: We are discussing the possible purposes of a God whom you have always described as purposeful. You insist that his purpose for creating life was to create us. You can hardly then claim that your purposeful God could not possibly have had any purpose for creating us, and so we theorize on possible purposes. The above are all YOUR “humanized” suggestions, and a few days ago you wrote: “all we can say is all or none of them are possible”. If your God is not human “in any way”, your “humanized” suggestions are all impossible. Nothing to do with religion. Simply you contradicting yourself.

All solved by remembering Adler approach as by using allegories. What gives 'love' a meaning in God's mind? Unknown.

99.9% v 0.1%

DAVID: The 99.9% did not just disappear. Going extinct they actually left living descents, the 0.1% surviving.

You just won’t accept (a) the facts of life, and (b) your own agreement. The 99.9% left nothing. Only the parents (same species) of the 0.1% of survivors left descendants! No species has ever been known to have 99 mummies and daddies from different species! Each successive 0.1% of survivors finally led to us and our food, as you agreed:

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: In case you don’t understand, this means that we are not descended from the 99.9% but we are descended from the 0.1%. The 0.1% were not the progeny (children) of the 99.9%, which means the 99.9% were not the mummies and daddies of the 0.1%! Only the parents of the survivors were their mummies and daddies, and they were the same species: the 0.1% of the species that survived.

I quoted Raup and you still do not understand. All of the cumulative 99.9% extinctions in evolution produced the surviving 0.1% of today. Forget mummies and daddies. He simply offered an overall descriptive statistic of extinctions leaving the living 0.1%. Nothing about lines of descent used. Dinosaurs to birds is a sliver of what he discussed.