I think you’re exactly on the right track with what you called downward causation. I would go farther and claimed as Berkeley does that there is no physical reality and we can show this logically. All of modern atheism is based on faith in a physical reality. It turns out it has no (physical) Foundation at all. Once eliminate this false idea of the physical universe the entire issue is reframed. And it becomes easy to see that science is extremely Limited when it comes to finding truth. Science can only tell you the way things appear when you are awake. It tells us very little about the ultimate nature of reality.
From a logical standpoint your conclusion does not follow from your premises. That I have the spirit of God guiding my actions in no way suggests that the knowledge of God must be revealed to me at any specific time or in any specific way. But don’t change the subject. You may have left your fundamentalist faith but the fundamentalist way of thinking is still very strong with you. It is obviously untrue that a literal interpretation of any text or speech is always the best or most true interpretation. Also you are operating under the very false premise that if something is not meant to be taken literally then it cannot contain truth or be true in a general sense. Things like symbolism allegory and parables are a few counter examples. Maybe you were taught as I was that if you don’t take the entire Bible literally then you have to throw out the entire thing as untrue. You decided you could not take it literally and so you followed your teaching and threw it out. Do you understand that? Before you go talking of how science is clearly true why don’t you first explain to me how you know that your life is not an illusion of some kind. How do you know that physical objects and all of you know of science is anything more than a description of your experiences. What evidence do you have for the existence of a physical object like a cup. If you had a dream about a cup you would be able to touch it and see it just like as if you were awake. Therefore you know it is unnecessary for there to be a physical cup in order to explain your experiences of cups. Science describes our experiences in real life but how do you know it is physical? How do you get around the paradoxes that arise with physical universe such as the problem of it’s origin? Do you think that science will eventually find all the answers? If so how are you any different from the fundamentalist who says that we just have to take it all on faith?
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Jamie, you ask some good and appropriate questions. Questions that, IMO, would take a great deal of time and effort to answer here and would derail the topic of this thread. So allow me to stay to the basics. There is certainly a philosophy (and even a religion, Buddhism) that says that nothing material exists, that all that truly is, is consciousness. Our human experiences and our sciences strongly suggest that this is not so. Granted, on the subatomic level things get rather fuzzy: particle, wave, quantum unpredictability. I don’t claim to understand it all. But for all practical purposes, I still live in a Newtonian world where the chair I sit in now, despite being 99.9% empty space, holds me up and will do so tomorrow. Science is a way, a tool, for understanding how the Universe works. Is it inerrant and infallible? No. It makes mistakes. But unlike religion, it admits its mistakes and tries to learn from them, instead of insisting, as Christianity does, that what was written 4000-2000 years ago is accurate and will never require revision or further understanding. Christianity rests upon blind faith, with no evidence. Certainly there is external (to the religion) evidence that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate, but Christianity does not rest upon this historical event. Instead, it rests upon the claim that God died and came back to life after three days. And it rests upon the notion that believing that God came back from the dead somehow guarantees that an immortal part of you (which science has never found) will go to heaven when you die if you believe these unverifiable claims by faith. It is far easier for me to prove to you that a cup exists than for you to prove to me that a person (or a Deity) died and came back to life after three days. Everything we know about science tells us that this is not possible. So if you take the resurrection as an actual historical event, you do have to just “take it all on faith.” And my challenge to you concerning the Spirit of God simply proves that God is NOT in you. If he was, you would know what he does. Even the apostle Paul says that Christians have the mind of Christ. So you should know EVERYTHING Jesus (who is God according to Christians) knows. If you don’t, your claim that Christ is in you is false, unverified, wishful thinking with no evidence whatsoever. If God is in you, solve this Genesis problem. Better yet, if God is in you, please give us the cure for cancer. Surely God knows the cure for cancer, does he not? Prove your faith. If you can’t, then who is really living an illusion?
speak for your own christian belief. If you regurgitate Dawkins you won’t get far. Try logic instead and you will figure out that it is the evidence upon which you form a belief. Only when you become an atheist this notion goes amiss as atheists form non beliefs based on a perceived lack of evidence incapable of figuring out that if faced with a proposition you have to either believe it to be true or to be false. To believe means to ‘think but not know’ that proposition “A” is true. If someone claims to not think and not know they are true materialists 
and useless when it comes to debates.
I think your INCLUDING an overcast world is a result of your exposure to science. I don’t think people in a pre-scientific culture would even think that CLOUDS would first FILL THE HEAVENS and then disappear. It’s much more likely that they will think there is NOTHING in the heavens … and then there is SOMETHING.
This THING is the firmament… colored BLUE, because it is the bottom of a celestial ocean.
But really… now that I understand this is all a VISION in this scenario… enjoy yourself. Include any element you like…
That a ancient wouldn’t think of something like that is exactly the point
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What is it about your human experiences that strongly suggest there is a physical reality? I don’t think you really considered it because you’re dismissing it out of hand as if there are good arguments to do so. That is an assumption you are making almost unconsciously because the idea that the physical reality is not actually physical is something that is very counterintuitive . But there aren’t any good arguments and on the contrary there are very good arguments to take the opposite position. Every atheist I have talked to IRL about this has actualy conceded the point after discussion. Your experiences are all you have. Science is merely part of your experience. It can’t tell you the true nature of your experience. Yes Buddhists do believe something along these lines but they are by no means the only ones. In the interest of not taking the thread off topic perhaps you would like to have this discussion in another thread. Your argument about the spirit is a complete strawman. Either you never understood the concept of the Holy Spirit or you are deliberately misrepresenting it. Holy Spirit doesn’t make me a god it doesn’t give me gods knowledge or mind but it does give me is Hope. When you understand my point about the physical reality you are going to see that the concept of a soul makes perfect sense. You would also see how absurd it would be to expect science to discover a soul. Here’s a simple analogy. If we imagine that real life is like a MMO role-playing game, our bodies are like a character Avatar and our soul is the person behind the screen. In-game objects and actions have real effects on other players but there is no physical objects involved. Science is like investigating the game mechanics from inside the game. It tells us about what it’s like to play the game and how to play it better but it tells us nothing about the programming behind the game. When you say there’s no evidence of God that’s like in playing a video game and seeing no evidence of an operating system or game engine. You can’t learn about the programming by playing the game. What you see in the game is not Ultimate Reality. We can’t see our Ultimate Reality. We can think about it philosophically but science can’t help us with that. I love science. I love technology. I keep up with all the latest news and biology and engineering. But I don’t make the mistake of believing that there’s nothing I can’t see.
Take a moment to think about this from an empirical scientific perspective. Have you ever actually been skeptical about physical objects? Have you ever question your faith in them? If you want to find the truth you must make as few assumptions as possible. Preferably none. You know from your experience with dreams that a physical reality is not necessary to explain your experiences. When you are awake or asleep a cup still seems like a cup. The only thing you can know for sure is that you exist. You know that you have experiences. The experiences that you have direct influence over you called dreams. Those you don’t you call real life. If you call yourself a mind and you know that you exist, then like it or not minds are the only kind of thing which you have hard evidence for. You have no such evidence for physical objects. Everything you experience in real life could be the “dream” of another mind, could it not? If this other mine was much more powerful than your own, could that not explain the high degree of order and complexity that we observe while we are awake? Is it not much simpler ( and by Occam’s razor, preferable) to explain your experiences based something (minds) that you have hard, direct evidence for? Yes it is. So it turns out you already have an explanation for your experience using what you know. You can’t just go off and postulate the existence of some other kind of thing ( physical objects) which you have no evidence for. Postulating physical objects is therefor unjustified. Sure it’s counterintuitive. But that’s why we need logic. That’s what logic is for. So we can know when our intuitions are wrong.
Well, I think there are a few non-negotiable truth claims you have to believe in order to be a Christian and the resurrection is one of them. But, you could think Jesus’ resurrection is just an inspiring story and still probably be a mainline Protestant. 
I’m really not understanding your conception of the process of understanding language and deriving meaning. If you have gotten any meaning from a text, you have interpreted it, and you haven’t gotten some objective “true meaning” you have constructed your own best guess about what the speaker/author intended you to understand, or you have a satisfying concept of how it is meaningful to you. A text sitting there by itself, inspired or not, with no one attempting to understand it doesn’t “mean” anything. It’s just arbitrary symbols until someone tries to make sense of it. “what it says” = “what I think it means” Interpreting is not some sort additional “infusing meaning” into the text, it is the very basic act of communication itself.
It means what God intends it to mean. We have guesses about that. Good ones and lame ones, wishful ones, and arbitrary ones, and more or less likely ones. I don’t think we can get some kind of perfect meaning out of the Bible, and I don’t think it was ever intended to be primarily a source of information or propositions. It is a collection of narratives that God weaves into his own metanarrative and that shapes are own narratives. I think we can get enough meaning to know God sufficiently and live well.
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Christy, I’m glad you seem to at least understand what I’m saying, even if you disagree. 
“It means what God intends it to mean.” Exactly! And because we are not God, we have no clue what it means. We have, as you say, guesses. And all of this would be okay if we believed, as many liberal/progressive Christians do, that these stories are simply ancient accounts that call us to explore our own relationship with God. Unfortunately, the loudest Christians and the ones who give scripture the highest status believe that your immortal soul is at stake if you don’t agree with Christian doctrine (which is someone’s interpretation of the texts). For example, the Bible nowhere uses the word “Trinity.” But that doctrine became, as you say, a “non-negotiable truth” over which Christians put Unitarians to death. The Church has always been against free-thought. This is why it requires Creeds and Statements of Faith, to ensure that no one has an independent thought. But, as you have said, to read the Bible is to interpret it. But I, respectfully, disagree that we are even close to knowing God sufficiently well. One of my friends is a Calvinist who reads the same Bible I do and is convinced that no one has a choice about whether they become a Christian or not. To him, God chose before the foundations of the world who would go to heaven and who would go to hell. And the kicker is that he has scripture on his side to back him up. I suspect that we find what we are looking for.
I would say we have the mind of Christ through the indwelling Holy Spirit, so we do too have a clue what God means, but that’s just me being all Trinitarian.
But not on this forum. We let the Unitarians hang with us. The graciousness is just flowing.
He has interpretations of Scripture to back it up. There is grace enough for all of us, even Calvinists. Even they know they need an extra does, which is why they put the word “grace” in almost everything they name. 
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Ever thought about why you suffer from cancer or why you suffer death? Figure you neither understand the story of creation nor the story of the fall.Looks like you eaten from that tree in abundance. Jesus died for you so you could understand how to cure and how to have authority over death. Try thinking and eat from that tree of everlasting life he given us to eat from. Just don’t think of apples all the time
considering that some of us think of the ancient folks of being so primitive without science it makes you wonder what made them think that plants existed before the sun was visible in the sky. But then why should we think about the meaning of words from someone living thousands of years ago if we live in the age of science. Those clueless folks could not know anything about life without science. They did not even have a word for quantum fluctuation or molecular biology so how could they have any idea
If the only conclusion some arrogant prick can come up with is that they wrote about the plants to exist before the sun was in the sky because they were clueless and not because they thought that their words have a meaning it tells you a lot about those people and their attitude towards others.
So don’t worry about those who try to belittle you with comments like:.
But really… now that I understand this is all a VISION in this scenario… enjoy yourself. Include any element you like…"
as it only tells you how great their minds really are
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I think that God doesn’t provide a cure for cancer or immortality for that matter for the same reason that he doesn’t handout wealth. This is a fallen world which we are not meant to be in. There are greater things. Sickness pain and death remind us of this. With an eternal perspective we can have joy no matter what happens to us in this world.
Well spoken. There are those who think there is no God because he does not grow new legs on amputees displaying their superior grasp of comprehension. The best is that they appeal for Christians with higher education convinced they would come to the same conclusion. It is funny how you can catch people out by their intellectual pride making them fail in critical thinking by letting them waste their time on the answer instead if critical examination of the question.
If you look at those who truly suffer you will find them to be far more thankful for what they have got compared to those who suffer the absence of wealth and convenience. The secret to happiness is to be thankful for what you got. Only the fools think it to be about making sure you have enough.
I run across Atheists pushing that idea about amputees. There’s a number of issues with it. People don’t rise from the dead either, despite what the Christian bestsellers might suggest.Clearly some things are meant to be permanent. The amputee thing is meant as a disproof of miracles, with the claim that anyone who survives, say cancer, because someone pray for them, really only survived because they were part of the statistical 2% who randomly survive anyway. But since God is in control, that 2% isn’t really random. But again as I said, I think prayer is really about “thy will be done”, It’s not a magic lamp. And of course anyone who sets out to test the efficacy of prayer scientifically is going to fail matter what. “Do not put the Lord thy God to the test”.You cannot separate God from the natural order, Because he created the natural order.But even more importantly with regards to this amputee nonsense, None of those atheists would believe in God if a amputee was healed. They would believe in aliens sneaking around healing people’s limbs before they believe in God. So ultimately there being hypocritical because they wouldn’t Even accept the proof that they Say they need.
If someone prays to god to havee reality fixed his way s/he believes in Santa doing magic, not God.doing logic. The logical incoherence of the video 10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer" is great and it is a good teaching material for sunday school about critical thinking, how to understand the bible logically, what healing is about and how to pray. I wonder how many Christians here say “and this I ask in the name of Jesus” without understanding what it means to pray in his name, e.g. to pray like he has prayed.
We usually leave out the “Thy will be done” part. Watching that video was rather like getting beat over the head with a 2x4. I guess he gave up on logic and went for brainwashing instead. Sad thing is, for many people it works. Too many people believe the lie that the Athiests have “science” and “logic” on their side. But what they do have is the media and the schools.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created heavens AND the earth. I contend that matter is real all right and God created it. Pure idealism - that all is mind and its infinite manifestations, and that matter is the unreal and temporal - is espoused by Christian Science but I am afraid this thinking forces one to select only parts of scripture and not the whole of it. And you don’t have to. Quantum Physics, which I like to call God Physics, allows a God to choose reality collapsing the wave form of quanta to a particle and in a position of choice and thus create reality. We unfortunately cannot see the future so we select or observe quanta randomly and take the statistical outcome. God doesn’t. It explains a lot about how a “glorified body” can work after resurrection, and all sorts of neat stuff. God is great.
It is perplexing indeed about that God knows the future but still allows us to make a choice. God never forces anyone to accept Him or the truth, while He already knows who will and who will not accept Him… You have to choose it, and indeed it is the only choice we have to make - follow His way, or follow our own way. Once we make the choice to follow our way, then it is cause and effect and we are like a ball in a pinball machine binging back and forth until will fall in the whole. When we choose God’s way we are delivered to eternal life and a peaceful heart that can survive all strife - because God provides for our daily needs (not wants). The actual PROOF of God’s existence is to put your trust in Him and discover how it changes your life. I know because I did it at 61 years old after 40 years of searching. I would have suffered much less if I would have chosen earlier but the good news is that God did not give up on me because in my heart I kept pursuing the truth. Keep it gong!
Regarding the issue that birds in genesis 1 came before land creatures which seems contrary to scientific evidence, I have this to add. When I sent the link to the creation.com web site, I thought that the interpretation of the Hebrew word bird was perhaps helpful in that it meant flying creatures with no mention of feathers. But to better counter your point about birds had to follow land creatures, I might suggest you are assuming that evolutionary processes created species in certain orders based on DNA evidence. There is a string on Quantum Evolution in Biologos that submits that evolution could be accomplished scientifically by observance and creation of God. If so God could have created the DNA to create bird life out of order as deemed by our scientific assumptions. Furthermore, the land environment was not as stable as the ocean environment for supporting life at that time and so birds that could migrate would have a higher chance of survival along sea shores. Finally fossil evidence for bird life may be more difficult to come by as they can flee catastrophic events to avoid being fossilized as easily as land creatures. I have a PHD biochemist step son who claims that evolution of virus and bacteria proves the evolutionary process. But for sea and land animals the definition of species requires male and female components that can create viable offspring that can procreate as well. I submit the creation of species is only by the hand of God, while the extinction of species is by environment and the hand of man who has been given dominion over the creatures of the earth. Question: Is there scientific evidence that can refute this?