Robert Morein wrote:
"Andre Jute" wrote

[snip]
Just for the record, because I think you and I are having a
misunderstanding, I deny categorically that I have ever tried to "meld"
scientific philosophy with anything antithetical to it. That, if you
meant it, would be the unkindest cut of all to a rationalist.

Andre Jute

All fine and good, but the initial post still leaves me with a question. Was
"What God wants..." merely a rhetorical flourish?

Good heavens, no! I rarely make a literary flourish generating an
unintended subtext. No, that was a straight-up provocation to the
arrogant who believe they know what their god wants. The whole original
post demonstrated that they cannot know. My sentence about not being
arrogant enough to judge god includes the subtext that I do not claim
to know what he wants, a deliberate negation of the title of the
thread.

The key is in my opening par:

Since you alehouse philopsophers want to waste your time on the
unknowable, here is one for you, entirely on-topic, of course (1).

I am allergic to this,
for many people, the literal belief that the Universe is guided in a
teleological fashion.

I am sensitive to this problem. At a lesser level, I recently wrote on
RAO that I believe there should be only one world language because I
have experience of minority languages fueling irredentism. The thread
was probably called "Let them speak English" or something like it.

Historically, it has fueled much religious insanity;
"God wants you to be fruitful and multiply..." followed by calculations of
the "carrying capacity" of the planet, which, acccording to one religious
authority to be some 500 or 600 billion "souls."

That many people would have to sleep standing up!

When I wrote satire for radio and television, seeking inspiration I
made pilgrimage to the shrine of mathematical absurdity, the seat of
Archbishop Ussher, who calculated that the world was created in 4004BC.
Creationist math has a long, ludicrous history!

So, "What God wants..." was bound to set me off.

Ha! It is exactly the sort of statement that sets me off too.

The center of my speculation is that all logically consistent universes
exist. This allows me to vacate the concepts of "existent" and
"nonexistent". Razor redux.

Andre Jute
Darwin redux