Example? Of a scripture that’s difficult to understand as meant to be taken literally or ‘poetically’.
I see your point. The explanations of death we’re discussing though are from different books so I can see at least the possibility that they could have different meanings and wouldn’t necessarily have to have the same meaning. Keep in mind I’m not stating which I think is correct but also just making an observation.
Much of not most of Psalms is poetic in many ways with many parts not literal. Single example Psalm 3:7 and others are similar where he is asking God to break the teeth of his enemies. When I was younger and read that it was extremely confusing because I was also hearing to literally love my enemies. Yes there is a time for each but much of the Psalms and Proverbs are not meant to be taken 100% literally. There are many references in Proverbs that if you do good God will make you prosper materially and you’ll never be in want for food or shelter. Job comes to mind as does the early church who suffered incredibly for following Jesus.
So you have no example?
Partly this goes back to whether animal death should be considered “sin,” if animals are not seen as having moral agency – if Adam and Eve getting kicked out of the garden is showing humanity coming into true moral awareness for the first time, then maybe that is intended to inform our view of what sin is (and is not).
I wouldn’t say I’m entirely clear on my own thoughts here, so thanks for helping me think through them. I have no problem believing that “death” is used different ways depending on the context, book, and author, but parsing that out is not easy. But when it comes to things of the future, I see much more inviting picture than the here and now. I don’t see why an end of spiritual death wouldn’t mean an end of physical death too, but it’s hard to wrap my head around what that would look like on this side of the glass.
Sure, but my issue is that you seem to quite easily believe that the beginning of spiritual death had absolutely no correlation whatsoever with the beginning of physical death.
Yes, because I think physical death is simply a consequence of existence in a material world. And perhaps spiritual death is also a consequence of that, but since we can’t escape physical death, it makes sense that spiritual death would be of greater concern in scripture.
I think you have lost it. The war stopped the holocaust
I did not say that that pain and suffering causes good. I said that pain and suffering might be involved in doing what is right.
Some people decry animal suffering, but still eat mean even though humans are killing animals for food, just like hyenas are.
Here is what you said before:
Perhaps you misspoke, or left out some important context/nuance?
We also try to limit suffering when we kill animals, and we throw people in jail for cruelty to animals. Even then, we humans are more than capable of doing evil things and being a hypocrite. We tend to think it is immoral to withhold treatment that could ease a person’s suffering or cure them of disease. As you allude to earlier, we think a person is evil if they cause pain and suffering.
So how do we approach a situation where someone allows people to suffer and die when they could stop them from experience pain and death it at any moment?
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Somehow I think we’re going in a circle, because I find I’m about to ask you if you deny belief in a material bodily resurrection, and/or if you believe that the future resurrected material body existing in a material world must therefore experience physical death…?
And again, not trying to trap you or something, but I find myself forced to ask, to clarify… do you honestly not believe Scripture is concerned with or teaches as central to its message a bodily resurrection to eternal life, and thus the escape from physical death? I seem to find it discussed all throughout the gospels, Paul, the general epistles…
The promises throughout Scripture about a resurrection to eternal, physical life certainly seem enough of a concern throughout the New Testament that the belief in “life everlasting” also made it into the creeds, no?
Yes, I can see what you mean, and I do believe in a physical resurrection in that sense. If we will be with Jesus for eternity, that suggests that both physical and spiritual death will be done away with. At the same time, I have no idea how different this “physical” existence will be from what we know now.
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Sounds like you are clinging to the non-Biblical idea of God as the great watchmaker… and thus you think of evolution as a design tool to accomplish some preconceived blueprint. We can use the evolutionary algorithm to design things also, but the result is something we would never think of. There is no blueprint. What comes out is a surprise to us – except for the fact that it works extremely well.
The Biblical image is not that of watchmaker but a shepherd. Because this blueprint kind of design is the very difference between living things and machines. The shepherd’s role is that of a guide and protector not a designer – only intervening when the sheep go astray or are in danger. And sometimes that means cleaning up carcasses or even culling the sheep.
Yes. I do not like Hyenas. I was likewise shaken by a video of a lioness and her cubs wiped out by a chance encounter with cobra. It seemed totally pointless. But the lesson here is that the cruelty is a part of the nature of life itself whether evolution is in the picture or not. And it frankly the Bible is also rather brutal. Thus it seems to me that both atheists criticizing the brutality of the Bible and Christians criticizing the brutality of evolution are both being rather hypocritical.
For me evolution is the answer to the oldest and greatest criticism of theism from Epicurus known as the problem of evil and suffering. Evolution shows us two fundamental facts:
- Death and suffering is a necessity of life, without which life wouldn’t even exist.
- Life is a self-organizing process participating in its own creation with its own decisions. (And thus we cannot lay the blame for how things have turned out on God)
The possibility for evil is inherent in the nature of life itself. Living things make their own decisions and do things for their own reasons. The Bible shows us that God does not micromanage but only steps in when thing are going way too far off track… like maybe a meteor impact for the dinosaurs and a flood for the first human civilization.
Yes because the evolutionary process does eventually show us that cooperation is the ultimate strategy of success. To be sure it seems to be fundamentally selfish and all about individual survival. But if that ruled supreme then we would only have one celled organisms and mankind would only have Daniel Boones. It is a total error to think the key to mankind’s success comes from intelligence. It does not. Our real success, the foundation of civilization and technology is cooperation.
What we are learning in the new era of AI is that reasoning and intelligence is not that special. Machines easily surpass us in intelligence when it comes to all our games of strategy. It is after all simply a matter of following a set of rules and even elementary particles can do that. That is another reason why looking for God in a clever watchmaker or intelligent designer is misguided. What makes the shepherd God great is not cleverness or intelligence but service – being there when needed… even if it is just to comfort us when we suffer or to morn us when we go too far astray.
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No time to respond to everything you stated except the main misunderstanding. I do not view God as simply a watchmaker but a creator of everything including more than we can even imagine much less understand. With our limited minds we can barely fathom just the concepts of space time and matter coming into existence. Meaning none existed before hand so what was “that”. My point is if evolution is true then he designed and enacted it. Which IMO logically implies he had choices. I’m also never convinced by the view that any type of life requires intense suffering and death because those won’t exist in heaven. We’re so bound to our type of existence we can’t envision much else.
The main point of my original post has long become lost because so many other issues like this keep dominating the conversations. I’ll repost in a different wording and hopefully I can be much more clear and precise.
Maybe you didn’t, but it seemed above that you acknowledged that this first creation wasn’t ‘perfect’, allowing for the existence of death and suffering. Maybe, in fact, it intentionally prefigured our Lord Jesus’ suffering and death.
None existed outside of God. But I don’t think God created anything which He lacked in Himself including such things as time and space. Absolute time and space are now defunct concepts in science. Thus it is not a matter of either-or. God was always quite capable of time and space without the one He made for us.
Evolution is life. And yes God came up with that idea of life and enacted it because He values love and freedom more than power and control. The whole point of life is that He was willing to have others exist and make their own decisions so that everything would not always go His way alone. The world with life in it would be cooperative venture with both Him and others making the choices about what would come about.
Sounds like the “heaven” in HG Well’s time machine which turns people into sheep, or the heaven in the tv series Buffy the Vampire slayer which made Buffy a basket case and weaker, unable to cope any more with the world. I do not believe in your “heaven.”
I believe in eternal life which is a parent-child relationship with an infinite God where there is no end to what He has to give and no end to what we can receive from Him. Not peace and rest which is like unto death but the challenge, growth, and expanding awareness which is life more abundantly. That is what it takes to make an eternal existence worthwhile. God simply asks us, “I set before you life and death, therefore choose life.” If eternal rest is all you want then you should be an atheist. What more perfect rest is there than the oblivion of non-existence. I admit it sounds nice. I even think it is too good to be true.
I would recommend just rewording your question right here.
Once again I must not be communicating well. You’re reading all kinds of unsaid and unintended aspects into a brief statement. I was hoping for conversations about the original post rather than debates about side issues. I’m out
Everything I posted was meticulously addressing first the OP and then your response. You say you want other people’s thoughts on those things but now you are only interested if the discussion goes in some direction you have planned.
take this part
It is you who seem to be misunderstanding me… maybe it is just too big of a paradigm shift for you. I am contrasting the idea of God as a master designer with the idea of God as a shepherd. You seem concerned that what God has created seems more diabolical than good, and it is my suggestion that this is from putting God in the role of a designer as if things can only be as God made them to be. But that is only when you make non-living things like dolls and machines – not like children and students for example. Everything they do is not according to what the teacher or shepherd wants. That includes the hyenas. They are not machines but living things and what they do is a product of their own history of choices and not some diabolical designer.
First let me set something straight . Pain and suffering and even death is NOT evil. It is natural and in that way good.
Pain, suffering, and even death were created as good, but they can be misused like almost everything. They are not good or evil per se. A person is considered evil if he or she inflicts needless pain and suffering on others.
If you are4 saying that God should be considered evil because God presumably could stop all the evil pain and suffering in this world. However God could do this only by depriving humans of their freedom and responsibility.
Freedom includes the freedom or choice to do wrong. No harm, no foul. It also deprives humans of the freedom to do right, because if there is no evil, there is no good. God helps us to overcome evil, but God does not use magic to do so.
See my essay God and Freedom on Acedemia.edu.
What freedom? What responsibility? Apart from modern, Western, luxury illusions?
Freedom to do good or evil and responsibility for one’s actions are what is needed because this is a testing ground. You choose, by what you do, either eternal life in Heaven or eternal oblivion in Hell.