Did the Spiritual Realm Evolve, Was it Created, or Does It Even Exist At All?

If it is your ‘claim’ to believe in the Bible (Not in a pejorative sense. Just, you claim to believe), but also believe that God created the world we see using the process of evolution, this is for you. I have never seen any discussion of this issue.
If we evolved:

  1. Does an ‘unseen realm’ exist, at all (IE: Spiritual Realm, Unseen Dimension, etc…)?
  2. If there is one, where did it come from?

If you prefer, I have a short questionnaire:

If You Believe an Unseen Realm Exists, How Did It Get Here, or There, Depending on Your Point of View? (Did it evolve? Did God Create it? Has it always existed?) What is Your Basis For This answer? Do You Have a Bible Reason?

Just for a frame of reference, what is Your Church Background? (IE: Baptist, Catholic, Presbyterian, LDS, Seventh Day, Assembly of God, etc…)

The material world was born from the spiritual world and it is a temporal place designed to serve a spiritual purpose: the evolution of the souls of the Fallen back to divinity. The spiritual world has been growing as needed to encompass the ever-growing immortal beings who reside there. The region of Hell was created as a temporary holding cell for the 1/3 of Heaven that followed Lucifer.

There is not a church today that teaches this, but there are plenty of spirits of truth that have taught humanity about the spiritual world since the beginning of time. The best sources are the works of Plato or the modern works of Johannes Greber and Beatrice Brunner. Jesus tried to teach about the spiritual world and His Kingdom, but few understood Him. This is why He promised the spirit of truth to teach humanity when we became wise and humble enough to listen.

Yes, as a Christian (Baptist specifically) I believe an unseen realm exists. I don’t think I’ve met a Christian who doesn’t, since Christians believe in God who is spirit.

I believe God created everything, as referenced in Hebrews 13:11:

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

While I believe God has always existed, and used the biological process of evolution to create on Earth, I don’t know enough to conjecture about his processes in the spiritual realm. That seems outside the bounds of our typical material modes of investigation.

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Putting quotes around claim does make it pejorative.

Evolution is only responsible for life. There is much of this world that was created by God using processes other than evolution.

Which renders the question about evolution and an unseen realm meaningless.

I know it does. I ordered the book from Amazon :grinning: Dr. Heiser is the author and it is quite a good book.

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Yep this applies to me on both counts.

Yes. Though it is only unseen in the sense that it is not part of the mathematical space-time relationships in which photons are used by our sight to gather information about the physical universe.

John 4:24 God is spirit. So, it comes from God.

Are you asking where God came from? He is considered self-existing. In other words the spiritual “realm” exists because God exists and then He created the angels which are also spirit. But I don’t think it is a realm in the sense of scenery or structure of space-time like the physical universe. This is not to say that it is devoid of space, time or scenery for God can use all such things as He desires. I suppose you could say that the spiritual realm is one where solipsism actually applies.

Liberal Evangelical as in the original Quaker/Western part of the evangelical spectrum rather than the southern baptist hijacked part of the evangelical spectrum… more specifically from the Vineyard churches which comes from the Calvary Chapel churches which comes from the Foursquare Gospel churches.

As a person who grew up Methodist (and still leans heavily towards Wesleyan-Methodist theology in understanding issues such as the Sacraments, church order and free will) and is also now Charismatic I believe in the spiritual realm and the Bible and mostly Jesus treated it as real, He even casted out demons and sent them back to where they belong. The Spirit Realm is alien and away from our material universe and didn’t evolve at all. The Spiritual Realm was made by the LORD God and it has been divided between two sides, the side of Light which is God and the side of Darkness, the side of Satan and the fallen angels and spirits. The Bible is clear that the evil spirits will one day be defeated and goodness will reign forever and ever. As a person who is a Postmillennialist I see that the kingdom of darkness of Satan is ever so slowly falling apart as the Gospel spreads all over the earth and soon in time an era of Christian peace (whether this era of Christian peace will be a literal thousand years or not I don’t know, I tend to treat it in a symbolic manner) will give way and all evils and darkness will fade away.

Then it isn’t really addressed to me but I hope you won’t mind if I register my response. I don’t identify as Christian (beyond the cultural sense) and I don’t attach more significance to the bible than I do to other books. However I do believe in an unseen realm which surely coincides with the spirit realm, though I prefer to call it consciousness.

Yes as already explained, I believe consciousness provides the grounding for such an Unseen Dimension. However I believe our consciousness comes on when we’re born and off when we die. After our death, the biome supporting the genome of our species continues and our species at least continues to generate consciousness of the spiritual sort.

I assume the capacity for consciousness such as ours has evolved with our species. Most animals have some sort of consciousness but ours has certain characteristics -self awareness, use of symbolic language, abstract thought, beliefs in something more- which better fit the bill as being spiritual.

I happen to believe in the afterlife and its “environment” the afterworld but not as the result of any religious belief. The literature on the subject is really too extensive for a complete set of citations. I would just point to the classic in the field, Frederick Meyers’ Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death as well as recent modern philosophers like C.J. DuCasse and others who’ve made a logical case for survival. The British and American Societies for Psychical Research (SPR and ASPR) have also produced an extensive body of research on the subject and there are even several recent rigorously controlled lab experiments with mediums that seem provide evidence of an afterlife. My advice to skeptics always is, read the literature (but they never do). Anyway, I consider belief in both our survival of death and our ongoing engagement in the process of reincarnation (also extensively studied in a scientifically rigorous manner by Ian Stevenson) to be evidence-based and not relying on any religious doctrine or dogma for support…

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