The Mind of God (The nature of a \'Creator\')

by dhw, Monday, October 11, 2010, 15:00 (5156 days ago)

We mortals are never going to get the answers, but that won't (and shouldn't) stop us speculating. David has supplied us with many posts detailing the enormous complexities of the genome, and we remain ignorant of the origin of the universe, of life, and of the nature of consciousness. For those of us who have no gut feeling, or have had no divine revelation, all of that in a nutshell comprises the case for a Universal Intelligence, which solves all the mysteries at a stroke. However, a UI creates mysteries of its own, not the least of which is its origin. That problem is obvious, but there are some that are not so obvious, and they involve trying to read the mind of God. Well, why not? Let's make a start with evolution. -Most of us agree that evolution took place one way or another, with a progression from simple to complex. David, who believes in a UI that created life, writes that "life started with unicellular forms, one type, the Archaea, and advanced after 3.2 billion years." The advance, shortly before the Cambrian Explosion, was to "multicellular forms...with different body parts". Maybe this theory, and the one concerning the dramatic increase in oxygen leading to the Cambrian Explosion, will change in the next ten or a thousand years, but let's just assume for argument's sake that they're true. What do they tell us about the mind of God? For 3.2 billion years, he left his bacteria to do their own thing. Evolutionary stasis. And so we come to a series of ifs. If the mechanism for evolution was already present in those unicellular forms, why didn't they evolve earlier? When the increase in oxygen (or whatever else led to multicellular forms) occurred, either he caused it, or he didn't. If he caused it, again, why didn't he do it earlier? If he didn't cause it, then evolution came about by chance. (Maybe it started before the increase in oxygen, but my focus is on the long period of stasis.) If God created life, it seems fair to assume he had a reason for doing so. If the ultimate aim was to create conscious beings (us), why bother with bacteria for 3.2 billion years? After them, why bother with all the dumb animals he created and then discarded?-Alternative explanations:
1)	He didn't have an ultimate aim. Things just happened that way.
2)	He did have an aim (us), but had to keep experimenting, like any designer with a purpose.
3)	He has some other aim, and is still experimenting.-If 1) is correct, things will simply carry on "just happening". Maybe he could control events but doesn't want to, or maybe he has no control. Either way, is there any reason why he should care about us as individuals, when we are constantly being replaced by more and more individuals? Is there in fact any sign in this apparently randomly rich, poor, happy, miserable world that he cares about us as individuals? If he doesn't, he is irrelevant to us.-If 2) is correct, WHY did he want to create us? Out of boredom / loneliness / curiosity? Whichever, is there any reason why he should care about us as individuals...etc.?-If 3) is correct, we are just another phase in his long experiment, so why should he care about us any more than he cares about any other extinct or will-be extinct species? Is there in fact any sign that he cares...etc.?-Some folk say we shouldn't try to read the mind of God ... often those who believe in a loving God but can't explain the signs of a non-loving God ... and of course all this is speculation, but we have the power of reason, and I hope my questions aren't unreasonable. -With regard to links between a UI and ourselves, please see my next post in response to BBella.