Hmmm. Do Christians have a quantifiable track record of acting justly and loving mercy? Over their non-Christian or other Christian adversaries? And victims? Since gaining power in the early C4th? Including within society?
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Excellent! A sense of humor is a very good thing.
I am more of a Bible Christian than a medieval Christian or âtraditionalâ Christian. I mean I believe in the Bible rather than tradition or the understanding of ancient or medieval peoples, rejecting things like misogyny, racism, and slavery which were commonly believed by such people. And then of course, like it says after my name, I am a scientist so I embrace its findings rather than clinging to the tiny awareness of ancient peoples extending only a few thousand kilometers in space and a few thousand years in time.
I believe Adam and Eve were the first human beings. I just donât equate human beings with a biological species. So I do not believe Adam and Eve were the first homo sapiens since this doesnât really agree with the Bible according to which the Earth was filled with some kind of people other than the family of Adam and Eve. Cain was afraid of them and the most straight forward understanding of Genesis 6 is that Cain and Seth married the daughters of these other people rather than sisters who are never mentioned in the Bible anywhere.
I have masters degrees in both (i.e. MDIV and MS physics). And I joined the forum from an interest in exploring the impact of scientific discoveries on Christian theology.
Hello Kendall,
Thanks for your reply.
Here are a cuppula things:
Please, do not expect to find any âBiologos responseâ to your question here in the Forum. This is a public space where, you will find if you havenât already, a broad range of views and interests circulate. Even the moderators moderate themselves and refrain from positioning themselves from representing official views of the organization. So, you do want to check the resources from the org home page. In the forum, we discuss, hash over, think through, sometimes goad. This is process live.
As a fairly standard-issue 21st century Protestant, I agree completely with you that God created human beings. The process by which he achieved that was evolution. In that process, the Lord in His power and wisdom, provided humans with a moral consciousness and conscience.
I agree with you that conscience can be altered, which is why my last reading of âMere Christianityâ was less than satisfactory. : (
I am not a scientist and donât play one at work. I personally donât feel the need to grasp the details of how God managed all this, but am not willing to accept the tortured fantasies and guilt trips that are thrust on us by certain organizations, whose motives I wonât speculate on here.
I am well aware that no explanation of human origins will neatly encompass all the things we think we know about the physical as well as the theological worlds. At least in the minds of some. There are questions I need to explore myself. But I am happy to live with unresolved tensions, rather than being subject to demonstrably wrong claims about Godâs dealing in the world.
I hope you find answers to the questions youâre looking for. I do recommend you read thoroughly in the Articles section of the orgâs website:
Resources - BioLogos.
There are some very good books in the resource section as well.
While I havenât finished it yet, the first chapter of this one is well worth reading:
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A quick detour off topic . . .
The one thing that has stuck with me since my New Testament class 25 years ago at university is the importance of not only textual context but historical context. That single semester class allowed me to get more out of Paulâs letters than the preceding 20 years in Sunday school.
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I mean, what other animal has been to the moon and wrote about it?
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Well, that accomplishment of ours is certainly not a biological achievement of evolution. I donât know that it is impossible for such a thing to evolve. We can and have imagined such a thing evolving and you will find quite a few science fiction books and films doing so. One that comes to mind immediately is the Japanese film, âGamera 2: Attack of Legion.â This film was mentioned in an anime which also features an alien which evolved such a capability, âNobunagunâ.
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At The Mountains of Madness also comes to mind for me. I should check out those films though.
Hmmm⌠I never thought of Lovecraftâs Elder Things being a product of evolution. But then the Gamera 2 movie doesnât explicitly say that Legion is a product of evolution either â I just assumed that. But I think the assumption comes more naturally to science fiction than in the horror genre, especially when dealing with gods and demons.
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Thank you for interacting with me. I was thinking about what word to use in describing myself. I thought the term Biblical Christian would cause people to think that I believed in an actual physical barrier around the earth or such things like that. I didnât imagine that calling myself a traditional Christian (on this one topic of Adam and Eve) would cause anyone to think that I might be condoning slavery. I am not sure that ancient or medieval Christians so much âbelievedâ in slavery as they were just part of a culture that practiced it since time immemorial. I think that controversies over this issue arose much later.
So do you believe that Adam and Eve were designated human beings by God at some point? Iâve read something similar to that. I wonder what you meant.
I feel at this point of my life that I have merely begun to dip my toe into the vast sea of knowledge. So, although more educated in theology than other topics at this point, I still have too far to go.
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Thanks, Christy. I most certainly agree with you that non-Christian humans are able to overcome their instinct. I live in China, where I have lived for over 20 years, and have seen that first hand. It is a completely secular society filled with some really nice people.
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I didnât think anything of the sort. I was just explaining my own way of thinking. My understanding did come from reading the Bible myself without anybody telling me what it said. But of course, it was ME reading the Bible and people get different things out of it.
And that is a good example⌠I came to the Bible with my own understanding of the universe as a scientist, and thus there was no way I was going to believe anything contrary to the findings of science. I just filed that sort of picture of the earth and the universe under the understanding of the people in ancient times. So for example, in the story of the flood, covering the whole earth cannot mean a global flood because there was no understanding of the earth as a globe â it is simply not what the word âearthâ meant at the time.
They were adopted and taught as His children to think of themselves as persons and to believe in things like love and justice â the sort of things you wouldnât find so much in the natural world. But once those ideas were out there then they would naturally spread to all homo sapiens and that potential defines humanity more than anything else.
When you say educated in theology does that include things like Biblical studies, church history, psychology, philosophy, ministry, and world religions as it was for my MDIV?
Pro-social behavior could also be subject to positive selection. It has been observed in primate studies that apes who are disposed to anti-social behavior do not necessarily enjoy favorable outcomes. While we live in a fallen world, evolution might not present a simple dichotomy of morality vs base nature.
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While I do think human beings are spectacularly more than animals, I donât have so low a view of animals as we see in the argument of @KSholtess . I persistently repudiate the idea that animals have no consciousness or no morality. I donât believe that is true and I think it largely comes from a rather desperate attempts to think of humans as more â because we treat animals so callously and think we should treat people better. I do think we are more, but those are not the differences (except perhaps in a quantitative way). The difference is language (which is considerably more than just communication). AND if we did find animals to have or to have acquired language then I would expect our treatment of them to change significantly.
The problem is not and never has been that we might descend to the level of animals. It is that we misuse the great gifts we have been given for destructive ends. For this reason animals cannot even come close to competing with human levels of evil and depravity. A measure of this are the many many different ways we threaten life on the whole planet.
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Where from? We have evolved up, not down.
Did you get to listen to the recording of the conversation between Francis Collins and Jane Goodall? JG talked some about just this.
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The archetypical garden of our yearnings, where want, shame, alienation, and ailment are unknown. This, of course, is not the world we experience.
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Maybe up biologically.
Right now, Iâm not so sure about how weâre doing psychically, or culturally.
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Sometimes it feels like culture which evolved to provide the trust-glue we need to thrive has been deliberately hacked to disseminate distrust and division.
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Thatâs a great term.
And a heart-breaking truth.
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I have been attending seminary for 10 years (I work and have family duties, as well as struggling with staying on topic, so that explains my slow progress), and I have and read daily a library of around 6,000 books on theology and Bible interpretation. But the large amount of material at hand seems to lead to less certainty rather than more. Progress is an uphill climb, the more so as I am getting into later middle age. There is so much to learn and so little time to do it. I donât think I will ever attain to a full education in these areas. I am doomed to wonder and wander for the rest of my life.
Postscipt: Lest you take me too literally, I must clarify that I donât read ALL of them every day.
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