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

by dhw, Friday, November 01, 2024, 08:22 (3 hours, 6 minutes ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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

You have lost the plot completely. You believe that your God’s only purpose was to create us plus food. However, at different times you have also accepted enjoyment of creation, interest in his creations, and escape from boredom as possible purposes for the creation of life. The question following on from your “only purpose” was what might have been your God’s purpose for creating humans. You offered his possible desire for a relationship with us, to have his work recognized, and to be worshipped. I accepted these possibilities, but then you contradicted yourself by saying that God was selfless and not human in any way. However, instead of acknowledging the contradiction you suddenly asked: ““why must He have a reason? It is part of your humanizing him”, pretended there was a difference between reason and purpose, and you are now pretending the months of discussion on your God’s possible purposes/reasons for creating us have never taken place! In order to do so, you have even left out the relevant section of my last post, which also refers to your contradictions concerning such “humanizations” as your God’s possible love and benevolence:

dhw: Your current concept of perfection is a selfless, emotionless being who inefficiently creates millions of species with no purpose except to design us plus food, but with no purpose for designing us plus food, although it is possible that he enjoys creating, is interested in his creations, loves us, is benevolent, and may want recognition and worship...These possibilities are possible but impossible, and you never contradict yourself.[…]

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”!

DAVID: 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.

You had no idea what Adler meant by his “allegories” and agreed that what mattered was whether God loved us in accordance with our own understanding of the word. Of course we do not know, but you have agreed that, like all your other “humanizations”, it is possible that he does ( “all we can say is all or none of them are possible”) .and then you disagree because you follow the guideline that your God is not human in any way.

99.9% v 0.1%

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.

DAVID: 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.

The bold, astonishingly, almost repeats what I keep trying to tell you, except that earlier you still slide in the word “produced”, which you defined as follows: “The 0.1% survivors are the progeny of the 99.9%”. Progeny = the children, and it is part of your desperate effort to prove that the 99.9% (designed by your God) were all essential for the fulfilment of his one and only purpose: to create us and our food. You have now agreed that Raup said no such thing. You also agreed that we are descended from the 0.1% of survivors, and I used dinosaurs as an illustration of how the majority of species went extinct, leaving no descendants. In brief, you have accepted Raup’s overall statistics, and clearly you no longer believe that the 0.1% were the progeny of the 99.9% of species that became extinct. The 99.9% remain irrelevant to your concept of God's purpose.There is nothing left to argue about.