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

by dhw, Tuesday, October 12, 2010, 15:36 (4942 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: I would have to say that the question goes further back than evolution, but we can get to that later.-I did say "let's make a start with evolution"!-TONY: I think the answer to what evolution reveals about the mind of God is that: 
a) The UI is aware of what is needed for life more than we could possibly imagine.
b) The UI is patient 
c) The UI has personality, creativity, and an eye for beauty.-No disagreement here.-TONY: The reason I annotate these in particular is because if you look at the end result and try to understand what is necessary for life to work even in the time frame immediately after the Cambrian explosion, you realize that the microbes were absolutely necessary for preparing the earth for what was to come. -No disagreement here either, and it's an important and productive point (see under "Evolution"). But it doesn't answer my question why ... if the mechanism for evolution was already present in the unicellular forms of life ... it took 3.2.billion years to proceed from unicellular to multicellular, or whether God was responsible or not for the increase in oxygen leading to the Cambrian Explosion, with the various questions related to that. Of course you can't answer, and I don't expect you to, but these are all preparatory questions for those that follow, concerning God's aim (if he has one), why he bothered with all the animals that preceded us and were later made extinct (incidentally,it was they who set the tone for most of the social evils subsequently attributed to man), and the all-important implications for our relationship with him.
 
TONY: The very process of micro-evolution is the best evidence of a UI's intrinsic sense of beauty. Everything about it is beautiful, from its deceptively simple mechanism, its efficiency, its variety, and its unquestionable ability to produce beauty no matter where you look. Even the most terrible events on Earth have a strange wondrous beauty to them. If you don't agree, watch a long video of a volcanic eruption with its arcing fiery ballistics and creeping magma flows, or a Hurricane hitting a beach with its high winds and waves. Gorgeous.-Agreed again. But I suspect the inhabitants of Pompeii would have found little consolation in the beauty of an erupting Vesuvius; the 2000 or so men, women and children killed by Hurricane Katrina would not have regarded the waves that engulfed them as "gorgeous"; and the 230,000 men, women and children killed in the 2004 tsunami would not have thanked God for creating such strange wondrous beauty. If you want to praise the UI's intrinsic sense of beauty, you cannot ignore his intrinsic sense of destructive ugliness. My point, as I tried to make clear in my original post, is that even if we accept the concept of a creator God, and whether or not he has a master plan, there is no sign that he cares about us as individuals. And if he doesn't, what is his relevance to us?