New Miscellany 1 & 2: humanizing, intell., first cause etc. (General)

by dhw, Saturday, June 14, 2025, 08:33 (13 hours, 30 minutes ago) @ David Turell

Humanization

dhw: You said yourself that he must enjoy creating or he would not do it, and interest in his own creations does not imply entertainment.

DAVID: Your God wants a free-for-all to be entertained.

That is your word, not mine, and I don’t like it. Nor do you, which is why you try to force it on me. So let us consider the implications. You agree that at least the behaviour of us free-willed humans is a free-for-all. If he finds our free-willed, self-inflicted sufferings entertaining (just watch the world news for examples), then he is a sadist. Another possibility is that he’s got fed up with us and is no longer interested. (Of course the atheist alternative is that he doesn’t exist.)You claim that yours is the accepted biblical version of God. That’s even worse, since it is he who slaughters men, women and children because he doesn’t like their free-for-all behaviour. Even your beloved Adler only gives us a 50/50 chance that his God loves us. So what is the other 50? Either he couldn’t care less, or he hates us. One theme that never stops recurring in the Bible is that we must love God and worship him. And yet you believe he has no self-interest. What saves you from considering these possibilities? I quote: “I first choose a form of God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.” In other words, you twist reality to fit in with your preconceptions. But please note my next comment:

dhw: NB I am NOT saying that he is a sadist. I am pointing out that the biblical version of God is open to such interpretations.

DAVID: Current interpretation has softened that view to remind us of the relatively savage times in which it was written.

dhw: So now you can pick and choose which parts of the Bible you believe, and that can only mean that it is not the Word of God but is the product of humans writing in the spirit of their times.

DAVID: I use the interpretation in the book: "In the beginning of" by Judah Landa, 2004, 178 pgs.

It’s no use telling us what books you have read if you can’t produce any arguments to refute the above or to defend your own theories. For instance, does Judah Landa provide us with biblical evidence that your God messily and inefficiently designed and had to cull 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to his sole purpose? Has he found evidence of mistranslation in the passages of the Bible which describe God’s various murderous slaughters or his instructions to the Jews to do their own slaughtering, or his desire to be worshipped?

DAVID: It assumes God is all-everything(as described) as in recent translation of Genesis.

dhw: If he is “all-everything” then he is as evil as he is good. Very helpful!

DAVID: All good is all that is described, and you know it.

I clearly know the Bible better than you do. Or do you regard the slaughter even of babes, the destruction of whole cities, the “love me or else” threat to humankind as “all good”?

dhw: The biblical form doesn’t even accept the theory of evolution!

DAVID: Geneses did not mention evolution, but humans came last.

The Bible only offers separate creation as opposed to evolution. And your own theory of God’s messy, inefficient use of evolution does not lead you to any “accepted” view of God, let alone the view provided by various parts of the Bible.

Intelligence and the opossum

DAVID: Can't you see, or don't you want to see how complex the play dead concept is?

It is no more complex than the tests administered to ants and crows, in which they observe different choices and use their (perhaps God-given) intelligence to make the right one. In fact, the opossum’s test is even simpler: he knows he is too slow to outrun the wolf, and in my hypothesis has observed first-hand this possible way of escaping death. He doesn’t even have a choice. And you still haven’t told us why you think your God specially designed a stupid creature who had to receive individual tuition in order to imitate what he may already have seen for himself.

Theism v atheism

DAVID: The design evidence is irrefutable! A designing mind is required.

dhw: Same answer: You propose an all-knowing mind as first cause. The atheist can start with a stroke of luck which produces the first primitive minds (the very first cells) which over thousands of millions of years design ever more complex minds. Sourceless genius versus one stroke of luck followed by evolution. You shut your eyes and jump one way. The atheist shuts his eyes and jumps the other way. The agnostic keeps his eyes open and prefers not to jump. We may never know who got it right.

DAVID: On a fence as usual.

Of course. That is the nature of agnosticism. Are you denying that it requires a leap of faith to believe either in a chance combination of eternally shifting materials, or in a sourceless, superintelligent superpower that has been lingering around in a nowhere for the whole of eternity?