So I’ll ask you.
Did God create the earth? I’m assuming you’re going to say yes.
So did God use supernatural means to make earth or can we look at the natural world and determine how the world was made?
If you say both, then clarify which is which. Which part is the natural and which part is the supernatural?
I’ve occasionally thought of it as initiating an interface: the humans of Genesis 1 had minds that were what so many scientists today think the mind is, just the result of what happens in the brain and nothing more; then God changed things, and the mind was transformed into a combined physical/brain and spiritual/soul (or spirit) endeavor.
Taking the word πρωτότοκος (pro-TOH-toh-kos) in Colossians seriously, that’s almost a necessary conclusion: since Jesus is the “opener of the way” with respect to created existence, then everything that comes into being takes its shape from Him.
The difference would be that prototokosian (to coin a word) image is limited in scope to one small aspect of the “form” of Christ, whereas the “image” as in “image and likeness” is full: the first re-presents Christ in some limited way and to some limited ‘audience’, whereas the latter re-presents Christ to every little bit of Creation.
[random thought: if there is indeed other life out there, maybe our destiny includes reaching the stars so that we can re-present God to that life as well].
You seem to have meant it as young-earth creationist, in which case it was not at all accurate. The essence of the YEC view of scripture is to read it as though it was someone’s great-great-grandfather’s diary written in English describing events he witnessed – and that he was a perfect observer that never got anything ‘wrong’.
Considering it from the perspective that the order of events is lifted out of Egyptian and other fertile crescent mythology and then all the details are changed in a way that says, “Are your gods are belong to YHWH” and the reason for that is that they are all created – and not merely created but created as tools or servants – it takes some real rejection of its literary nature in favor of reading one’s own meaning into it. Both its literary genres and its polemical purpose make a few things very clear: God created all things; He did so by sheer command; and He made humans as His representatives to all the creatures and as their representatives to Him – both of those being integral to what being “in the image of” means.
The first Garden story reinforces that by portraying humans as being formed by close personal attention from God, something no other creature had, and by noting that none of the animals was suitable as a partner for the first Man. Both those, in ancient mythological terms, draw a stark delineation between Man and animals, a line as between viceroy and subjects.
Even the second Garden story draws that line, in the curses, where it is shown that Creation itself has to be adjusted due to actions by those Imagers.
He’s stating what the scriptures clearly teach not just in one place but repeatedly as major themes on through Israel’s history. You can’t dodge God as Creator by some personal statements that make things vague, especially when the main passage in scripture that supports your contention that everything is to one degree formed in God’s (Christ’s) image makes it blatant that all things have been made through Him and that assurance isn’t in the past tense but in the present: all things that exist are being sustained in their existence by Christ, right now as much as when Paul wrote. As one of my theology professors put it, “Creation is always present tense”: He is not just Creator of a machine He set running without needing Him any longer, He is Creator every moment as He sustains all things in existence.
BTW, that has something to tell us about the topic here: since we are God’s representatives to Creation, and since God didn’t just set things running and then step away leaving things to run on their own, it is our task to be busy caring for and ordering all things for their benefit at all times. That doesn’t tell us what our ecological functions have been, but it does give us a starting point by saying what they are supposed to have been and to be!
Actually for much of human history people have engaged in managing and preserving wildlife – they just didn’t view it that way. Royal game preserves go back about as far as people having kings, and those game preserves functioned to keep many species from being wiped out due to indiscriminate hunting by everyone.
Interestingly, that’s a function of the ‘kingship’ involved in being in the image of God!
Game preserves are not very old, although there may have been older religious sanctuaries in Asia.
Tribes may have excluded competing tribes from their hunting areas for a very long time, much before written history. After the wealthy got power and sole ownership to pieces of land, there has been restrictions to hunting (only the owner or his household was allowed to hunt in that area). I would not name these game management or preservation, rather they were monopolization of resources.
Removal of competing predators can be called game management and that has a long history. Introduction of new game species is also an old habit, that was done for example in the Roman empire. Wider game management in the current sense started to become common about 300 years ago, in Britain. That was the time when people established game preserves and large numbers of gamekeepers were hired.
How long the history of game management is depends on the definition. If removal of predators is game management, then the history is very long. If we include only the modern idea of game management, then only a few centuries.
So yeah. That is how I meant he is acting because it is. Like you seem to be acting as well.
I’m not going to read anymore nonsense until the questions I posed gets answered. I’m not going to keep repeating myself or the same questions in response to the same nonsense.
Here is the final time and it’s a copy and paste of what I’ve said a few times now. If I am ignoring the Bible, then y’all should be able to answer these questions easily and clearly. If not…. Then tell me why I need to interpret them the way you do.
But preferably, you answer it on the other thread.
So I’ll ask you.
Did God create the earth? I’m assuming you’re going to say yes.
So did God use supernatural means to make earth or can we look at the natural world and determine how the world was made?
If you say both, then clarify which is which. Which part is the natural and which part is the supernatural?
The idea of pre-fall humans as more childlike, rather than as extremely knowledgeable, has a long history in Eastern Orthodox tradition.
[quote=
I answered your question. You asked how God stitched me together in the womb and I said reproductive biology is my best explanation. You think “natural explanation” means God is not involved. I think God upholds the universe and sustains all Creation with his being at every moment. He is in all things, omnipresent yet also more than the sum total of all things and transcendent. I understand “natural explanation” as “how God does things.” You think it’s at odds with theism. You are basically espousing atheism here and claiming to be a mainline Christian.
I also don’t limit my understanding of the world to only naturalistic explanations. Divine Revelation can supplement or even challenge natural explanations based on methodological naturalism. Supernatural things occur. God could have breathed life into humans a few thousands years ago to give them a soil and make them distinct.
I’ll offer an unsolicited observation. You seem to have embraced philosophical naturalism and are about a stone’s throw away from atheism IMHO. I pointed how how you clearly disagree with mainline Christianity, creeds, Jesus and the clear witness of the Bible, even when we accept accommodated readings. Accommodation doesn’t mean it’s all false or you can just dismiss based on what you read on your atheist forums. God is accommodating background knowledge and speaking truth through it. You are just dumping everything and thinking it’s “accommodation.” It is not. For most Christian’s we learn about the world via natural science and through what we believe is Revelation from God in the Bible and via the Holy Spirit through our personal experiences. Putting the Bible and natural science together, it’s only natural that science is determining how God does all the things the Bible repeatedly claims He does.
You apparently don’t even think god is our ultimate creator in the past. Just another part of creation, something that Genesis 1, despite a possible pre-existing void/deep, works very well to dispel. Accommodation doesn’t dismiss this view because this is one of the things the text intends to teach though accommodated language.
I only read the first sentence and stopped.
You’ve not been answering them.
So I asked how did God help with creating you?
You answered the same exact way as I did.
It’s not magic, it’s not supernatural. It’s plain old reproductive birth. It’s a man having sex with a woman and getting her pregnant and she carried a woman to full term.
So stop pretending like there is anything supernatural there. It’s not. So it is just basic biology. We all know this. So if it’s just basic biology, and nothing supernatural is there, then why should I pretend it’s God. Do we pretend it’s God causing kids to die from cancer? Is God there causing people to get morbidly obese? No. None of us try to force this creator bull crap into these events. Pregnancies are no different.
So when God says he stitches us together in the womb…. I know it’s not literal. Does not matter if god is involved or not. We know those verses are not literal. So it’s god saying something to ancient Jewish people in a way they can understand since they did not even understand how sperm and eggs worked. They did not understand how stars worked or what they were. They did not understand how clouds worked.
So stop pretending like I’m denying the existence of God. I’m not. I’m just saying when a woman miscarriages it’s not because of God dropping the ball.
So it’s perfectly accurate and correct to say pregnancy is a natural thing, not a supernatural one, and that a plain text concordistic reading and fundamentalistic literalist interpretations are not more biblical. It’s just having the same understanding as someone from thousands of years ago in ofer their head.
It should be noted. You can’t be an atheist when you believe in God, angels, Jesus being the son of god who rose from the dead and that apostles and those they laid hands on were healed even of death and of supernatural demonic powers.
But just because you believe that does not mean you need to think God literally made the earth or people. You can be extremely super religious and still not be concordistic.
I ponder that regularly when doing conservation work. It hit me even harder last week when driving north along the coast; on one stretch I took the back roads to avoid the stop-and-go traffic lurching through a town where three-fifths of the economy relies on tourists and the highway as it passes through town isn’t wide enough for half the traffic they get: looking at stream banks and marshy fields as I drove I saw acre after acre taken over completely by Japanese knotweed – and when I say “take over completely” I mean that literally because once a patch of knotweed reaches the maximum density a piece of land can sustain, all other plant life is gone, choked out, then with all the native flora gone native fauna vanishes. Every patch of the stuff I see, I recognize that humans brought it, generally through ignorance, often through neglect, and sometimes deliberately despite knowing there’s no way in North America to control the stuff except by poisoning the ground (the only herbicide potent enough to kill it has to be sprayed while it’s blossoming, and heavily enough that it goes all the way down the [deep] roots, then once the roots die a fair amount of the poison is still there in the ground).
Yes, yes, and yes.
I think of the mistake you’re making as a mechanistic fallacy, the assumption that there is actually a difference between the order humans see in Creation and the action of God in Creation. That’s a chunk of worldview that is alien to the Old Testament especially and it comes from a dualistic worldview that regards some things as secular or mundane and thus apart from God and some (much fewer) things as spiritual or supernatural and thus tied to God. The entire ancient near east would laugh in derision if someone could go back and try to expound that view to them.
Sure. And they would laugh at evolution, laugh at the earth moving around the sun and laugh that there is no dome over us and so on. All the ways that God accommodated them so that they could understand, they would laugh at it.
Since this is just a revolving vomit fest of the same two things being regurgitated like A no B no A no B I’m muting this post on my end and ignoring the continued convo by y’all.
You think evolution is divinely inspired? Interesting.
But the point was that your reading of the text requires ignoring that it is ancient literature, ignoring the kind of literature it is, and introducing concepts from a modern worldview – not as modern concepts but as concepts which should have been in their ancient worldview.
Retreating to lesser details that are not integral to the main point of a text is a fallacious way to deal with any literary text.
Regardless of the literary genres and polemical purposes Old Testament texts make a few things very clear: God created all things; He did so by sheer command; and He made humans as His representatives to all the creatures and as their representatives to Him – both of those being integral to what being “in the image of” means. It has nothing to do with any “personal understanding”, unless you want to throw out all scholarship and just say that everyone has a personal understanding and they’re all equally valid, but in that case there’s no point communicating because you’ve eliminated truth. What you’re totally ignoring is that at least three dozen books of the Bible call God the Creator and at least twenty state that humans were made in the image of God – and the primary text for both of those make it evident that the way in which humans are in the image of God is quite distinct from the way any other created thing is.
Repeating a false dichotomy doesn’t make the argument work any better.
Your reasoning is a form that once in the early church led to heresy when it crossed over into trying to define every action taken or word spoken by Christ as either human or divine. But that division is a denial of the Incarnation, and the reasoning that leads to it is a denial of God as Creator for the simple reason that “Creator” is not a title on a resume from long ago but a present and active job description. Each letter appearing on my computer screen is something new, and if it is new, if it has indeed not existed before, then God made it just as I typed it – and the same is true of every least bit of the universe, seen or unseen.
We recognize that God is sustaining in existence each atom and molecule that make up cancer cells, and that He also sustains the fat cells involved in obesity: He is their Creator moment by moment just as He is ours. And yes, that means that at any moment He could shut down the cancer cells and the fat cells and alter a child’s state of health. He Himself says this when He declares, “I form the light and create darkness; I make wholeness and I create catastrophe”; these are not just items that He sometimes claims responsibility for but declarations that if there is any light, He made it, if any darkness He made that, too; if any wholeness He made it, and if any catastrophe He is also its author.
This is a fallacy the western church has long made in the matter of the term “omnipotent”: it gets treated as meaning that God can do anything He wants, but the term when carried back a few languages means a lot more than that, it means that any power that gets exercised is God’s power – a point Jesus made to Pilate in fact. It’s not like saying that God can send electricity to any appliance in the house if He wants to turn on that circuit, it’s like saying that any time electricity arrives to an appliance it is coming from God.
Not from a biblical point of view it isn’t, because in the biblical point of view nothing happens apart from God’s will or power. That’s an aspect of a modern worldview, not of the text.
There again is your failure: it isn’t just some “fundamentalistic literalist” interpretation, it’s an interpretation that comes through regardless of which genre you read the text as. The only interpretation in this case that arises from a literalist interpretation is the idea that secular and sacred are intrinsically separate.
To not believe that is to throw out the majority of the books of the canon. “God made the heavens and the earth” means He literally, actually made the heavens and the Earth. It doesn’t tell us how other than letting us know it was done by command even though it has to anthropomorphize by resorting to “God said”, as though there was an audible voice.z
You ignore the obvious Christian answer…yes God did create all…if you want to play on words…whether supernatural or a miracle…who cares? You seem to care but theologically you havent given a reason why.
One thing that i dont hear from you…what happens to you when you die if you dont believe in God and salvation?
If you dont want eternal life, and if one must to have faith in order to received it…you are wasting your time here asking unimportant questions.
The laws of nature are not causally closed and thus they do not exclude the involvement of God. But even so, the laws of nature are largely a matter of probability distributions. And so for God to uphold the laws of nature, He will not alter those probability distributions. But this doesn’t mean that everything is just random and God doesn’t do anything. Miracles are by nature unexpected rather than the over all pattern.
So yes bad things happen, and God will not protect infants from behavior (like smoking) which weighs the probabilities in favor of things going wrong. We have to know that there are rules which govern our lives and act accordingly. But miracles are allowed and they do happen. You keep saying there is nothing supernatural and I agree. I don’t think miracles are supernatural because God designed the laws of nature to allow His intervention without anything magical or supernatural.
Thus I believe all the things described in the Bible happened exactly as they are told. On the other hand there were no scientists making measurements to prove they violated the laws of nature. Thus I can see many was in which the physical events could have happened with God’s intervention but without any violation of the laws of nature. Take for example the mana from heaven – there are many good scientific explanations of how that could have happened.
And how about the newborn infant. No magic. The infant breathes and grows because of what it is and not because of some divine magic. Many things can go wrong and God will not alter the probability distributions. But when nothing does go wrong, we are not wrong to be grateful for the miracle, believing that God was watching and doing what He could. But of course it does not follow that when something does go wrong that God made a mistake or simply wanted it to happen.
I apologize for my hissy fit. I did need a break, though it may take me multiple posts to catch up from here.
I’m not familiar with Mackie. When I said the earth was a “garden” until we showed up, I was specifically thinking about the fact that every inhabitable ecosystem – from ocean to desert to mountaintops and Antarctica – was filled with life before a single hominid appeared.
Taking “tend” and “care for” in Gen. 2:15 in the literal sense of the Hebrew, I’m not sure how to understand that other than a concept such as “stewardship,” which basically translates to “take care of things and don’t screw it up!” I think a fuller sense is conveyed by the fact those same Hebrew verbs are used of the priests’ “labor” in the temple. In those passages, it’s more accurately rendered by the English words “serve” and “guard,” i.e. to serve God and guard the temple from anything unclean. I think that metaphoric sense better works with the temple imagery and the fact that ha’adam, the man, failed to prevent the serpent from entering the “holy place” of the Garden. That doesn’t negate the responsibility to steward (and even beautify) God’s creation. Actually, both interpretations are true.
Naturally occurring fires are the result of lightning strikes, so “fire from the sky/gods” is a common myth, but it’s a long way from taking advantage of wildfire to “control” of fire, which is how archaeologists refer to what you’re talking about. It’s another leap from there to being able to start a fire, especially when the process has to be invented from scratch.
Sure, but altering the environment is nowhere close to destroying it. Let me expand a bit on the small population idea.
Sticking to sapiens, from our first appearance 300,000 yrs ago to the Out of Africa migration ~65,000 yrs ago, the overall population hovered around 50,000 individuals spread across an entire continent. They lived in small hunter-gatherer groups of 50 of so, and when a given territory could no longer support more than that, a band of young folks would strike out and set up camp next door. That process had “filled the earth” by the end of the last ice age, and it left its fingerprints in our DNA through the “founder effect” – the farther away from Africa, the less diverse the genome.
By the invention of agriculture/cities/temples around 10,000 BCE, the total human population was about 1 million. That’s about what the earth could support through hunter-gatherer means alone. By the time Jesus was born, the human population was 5 million. Extrapolate from there.
True. And one aspect of that was gathering dead wood and debris from forest floors to use for cooking or building. A huge problem with fire management in US national forests is the amount of dead wood gathering on the forest floor. Droughts just turn it into kindling waiting to be set on fire by lightning or inept campers.
Yes, @Vinnie is right there.
I’ll quit for now and catch up later.
A quick addendum regarding hunter/gatherers and “egalitarianism” in ancient societies:
I recently had a conversation with a scientist who published a paper about women as hunters and not just gatherers. It relates to @St.Roymond’s mention of human use of fire to drive prey into a “killing zone” in the PNW. First, consider the small size of early hunter-gathering groups. Depending on the richness (or lack) of resources, the avg is around 50. Now, start subtracting infants/juveniles, elders, and women. How many are left to hunt if it’s restricted to adult males?
Bottom line: When a group is small, it’s all hands on deck. Elders would be left behind to guard juveniles, which already accounts for more than half an ancient family group. So 20 adults healthy and available to hunt large game. Send all of them, men and women, or half?
The obvious answer is “all hands on deck.” Hunting strategy for ancient humans was to encircle large game and drive them into a trap. Our advantage wasn’t tools, but brains. 300,000 years ago, heidelbergensis women used yelling and throwing spears to herd big game (horses) to the edge of a lake where men were ready with thrusting spears to kill the animals trapped on the shore. The same applies to indigenous people in the PNW setting fires to drive game into a trap thousands of years later. The same also applies to berries or nuts becoming ripe. All hands on deck, male or female. The old sexual division of labor between male-female actually falls apart in light of actual history.
My mind makes strange leaps.
This brought a memory of a gal I knew where I was assistant to the manager at an apartment complex. She loved shooting, and due to ammunition costs tended to shoot .22 lr or .22 mag, and even there she managed to shave off pennies by getting the old standby lead ammo, which for anyone who’s handled much of it will know will get your fingers shiny gray from loading large magazines or even one round at a time. The moment she realized she might be pregnant she switched to copper-coated ammo and did some kind of vitamin therapy to flush lead from her system.
If you consider that the term for “serpent” can be rendered “shining one”, which often refers to a heavenly being, that is an interesting situation: what reason would ha’adam have had to think that the serpent didn’t belong there?
Figures for Rome out just the number of citizens at the end of Augustus’ reign at five million (an increase of nearly a million since the start!); of the whole empire, it was forty-five million. Those figures come from tallying official sources; estimating the world population is tougher but figures cluster around three hundred million. Interestingly, while the number of citizens increased under Julius Caesar and then Augustus, the figures for the empire as a whole actually dropped over that time due to the civil wars – and that includes the addition of a bunch of new territory.
While on a stretch of the Pacific Crest Trail when we came out on a bluff where we could look down at vast acres of forest we noted that the forest seemed to have dark and light stripes. As it was fairly early morning, we wondered if it was due to some sort of light effect.
Turned out the forestry people had been doing careful burns that paralleled the main access road to the area. The burned zones were as I recall sixty meters across while the unburned stripes were twice that – but the next set of burns would cover half the yet-unburned strips.
In another section we observed some fairly recent research from the Oregon State University School of Forestry being put into practice: the forest had been thinned, and of the debris left over a third was pushed together in low heaps, a third was chipped and spread unevenly, and the remaining third was burned in long, low mounds – quite a change from the then-standard practice of pushing all the debris into massive piles and torching them . . . which had the totally predictable result of sterilizing the soil to depths approaching two meters! The threefold method was intended to achieve a forest floor a lot closer to a natural one.
Slowly, we’re learning.
Last info I had on the Willamette Valley was that for spring and summer hunting was done by the adult men on a rather casual basis; the great burning was meant to obtain meat that could be stored – and not just to “make it through the winter” but to avoid hunting in unpleasant weather.
Yes and no (back again to the Willamette): berries ripening early were collected by women and children; it was when they reported that most of the bushes of a given species were ripening that “all hands on deck” applied.
Just to give an idea of the work involved in harvesting, out where I do conservation work, in early autumn one species of huckleberry gets so loaded with berries that more than once I’ve filled a two-gallon bucket right to the brim without moving except to rotate in place. While doing that once I was told by someone with local native blood that they’d been told that a lot of the harvesting wasn’t done the way we were doing it, rather branches really heavy with fruit would be cut and carried back to camp where plucking them from the branches could be done sitting down! [That led to my own discovery when camping out there: I clipped several branches loaded with berries and carried them to camp where I stuck them in a 3.5 gallon bucket early in the morning, the went off to gather clams from the bay. By the time I had returned with clams, cleaned them, buried the guts far from camp, then washed myself with a dunk in the surf, a good quarter of the berries had fallen off the branches. So we sat the berry buckets in the sun and by evening most of the berries were in the buckets.]
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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