Welcome from me as well. I don’t know where you’re coming from so I don’t know how well this will sit with you, but it is an answer originally meant for young earth creationists who claim that the first creation was perfect – it does address your question though:
I don’t think God created us using evolution. I think we just evolved through purely naturalistic mean. What I think happened is that sin did not exist, or rather no one was accountable for sin until God reached out and drew a line in the sand. Harvesting on the sabbath for example was not a sin until he said so.
Another aspect is free will. However, that leads to some counter arguments that is part of another thread I recently did.
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Thanks for your response. I’m not sure how humans could evolve without this being part of God’s plan when he created the world?
You made some points similar to another post I replied to
Thanks for your response.
Do you think The Fall had any real world effects? How would a pre-fall human differ from a post fall human? If one considers that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens had similar levels of intelligence, and that chimps and humans possess empathy and reciprocity, it seems highly likely that intelligent hominins evolved long before Homo Sapiens that were capable of anticipating and reflecting on the morality of their actions
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I’m just an agnostic who is curious about how Christians reconcile evolution with their beliefs.
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This is a great question, Roger. This is where I think Augustine’s view of evil is really helpful. I wrote about this in another thread here:
You can click the ‘V’ on the right-hand corner of the quote box if you’d like to read the whole post. Hope you find it helpful.
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The more interesting and challenging question I see … is how do some Christians (following their anti-science and anti-establishment impulses) reconcile falsehood with their otherwise Christian beliefs. I know … their first move is to deny that any of the imported dogmas are falsehoods at all, and try to live in an alternative reality bubble accordingly. But they must at some points realize they are called to engage with the world outside their bubble - and at that point then, there is no end of gymnastics necessary to try to entice others into the same bubble. Which is difficult, since those who don’t dwell there have already seen it from the outside and know that it doesn’t correspond with reality.
But to answer your question more directly - about how Christians get along with settled science; I guess for me the answer is this: I had already decided that any God worth worshipping is and will always be a God of both goodness and truth - all truth. And science in its best manifestations is all about the pursuit of any and all truth such as it can gain observational access to. So if science already has taken up residence in at least part of God’s kingdom - it wasn’t hard to accomplish this ‘merger’. Indeed no merger was necessary since science (in its ideal forms) was already there all along. All that was needed was a recognition of the fact. [Like discovering that the large couch I had been dreading trying to move is already in the place my spouse wants it after all!] Believers who embrace and pursue all truth already have science as one of the best pieces of equipment for understanding the mechanics of how God has worked - that’s already part of their intellectual furniture, and always was - with the notable exceptions of those parts of modern history where some tried to expel such curiosity from the sacred temple grounds.
The question of evil and free will remains a challenge for anyone despite their acceptance (or not) of what science has to say. Some special or recent creation of human life by God doesn’t at all answer the question about any culpability God might then have for such evil, but as Phil has noted, may even just make that question even harder to answer.
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- Thanks for the clarification.
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I think for me the issue is primarily that your arguments presume intelligent design and God controlling everything. It’s just not a reasonable position and a position like that can’t be reconciled with anything. The whole idea of God controlling everything that happens is not part of the biblical presentation of how God is active in the life of humans. For example.
2 Peter 3:9
New American Standard Bible
9 The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance.
Here it says that God does not desire for any to perish. So that means two things. Either universalism is true and everyone is saved. But there are a lot of biblical arguments against that. Plenty of verses demonstrate some will say “ lord lord “ and he will say “ go away I never knew you “ and they will be in “ outer darkness/lake of fire” which is death a second time. Or it means that even thought God desires this, he does not force his will upon people and allow them to choose.
So if choice exists for humans we can presume these choices exists for all animals. Some animals are more evolved than others. Different animals of the same species has different personalities. Not just among breeds we have developed through time but also among wild animals.
So all throughout the natural history of animals, choices have been made which undermines the belief that God some how forced things on earth to happen in order to bring about humans specifically. Which makes nonsense. So God wanted just Homo sapiens to make it and was ok with the other 20 or so species of humans to be wiped out? Or that God favors Asians over the others since they outnumber us all and so God is slowly creating an Asian dominate human race?
What about “if God loves freedom, why would he have made robots with no free will?”
Would you rather your significant others have no free will but only do what you want like a hyper realistic AI robot programmed to just make you happy or would you rather have someone fall in love with you and choose you?
So God did not create humans using evolution. God had reached out to humans who were created through evolution. Nothing about evolution falls apart unless we fill it in with magic. It does not need supernatural powers to explain it.
Sin is the byproduct of free will. The only way sin could not exist would either God never had a moral line drawn in the sand or he either had to erase the potential for sin by eliminating the ability to have free will.
So it seems God is perfectly fine with free will, and because of free will he presented a way in which we could choose goodness over badness and drew that line.
I think that gets to the question of what it means to be human. And that I do not know, but many consider Neanderthals to be human and perhaps some of the earlier species in our linage. Some who hold to a literal Adam and Eve even project them back 800 K years or so, and some who hold “Adam and Eve” to be symbolic of the population of humanity do as well. We just don’t know, and it probably also is not relevant to your primary question.
My musing is probably somewhere in the realm of God desired mankind to have free will rather than be meat automatons, and to have free will means we can choose to sin. And God hates sin because he loves us and wants what is best for us. Sort of like how parents feel when their kids make stupid decisions, but give them the freedom to make them anyway.
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This is a great question to which there is not a particularly good answer. @jpm probably gave the best one but I think that doesn’t fully address the problem.
When we see an unsolicited dog go and hump another dog, we don’t view it as a sin. If a human did that it would be rape and obviously sinful. Why the difference? We seem to know better. We have a moral choice and can process behaviors.
But as we see, we are the product of billions of years of evolution and have a propensity to do things we now think of as sinful.
The Christian religion generally teaches that creation was good and humans messed it up. This looks a lot like creation was bad and humans just exist within it and have to overcome their negative inclinations.
But none of this answers why God would use a system like evolution. Did He have to? Is it possible God wants us to struggle with overcoming our environment and our inclinations? Is the journey the point? To grow, learn and struggle?
But yes, theistic evolution throws a serious monkey wrench into how most Christians have understood the world the last 2,000 years. It appears to me that many on this forum have made peace with that but it seems the gravity of it is downplayed too much.
The fact that animal actions are not evil kind of precludes them from being good as well doesn’t it? They jut are. No more good or bad than a rain drop falling.
Dare I say most Christians would have trouble labeling the story of evolution as “good” as God declared the world to be in Genesis. Life thriving off the destruction of other life. A lion eating a zebra, is it good, evil or neither?
What makes creation good?
And I think most responses have completely whiffed in here as they do not address the first half of your statement…If God hates sin… this is a specific situation and generic information about humans/animals is hardly a good response. God hates sin but made us inclined to do a whole bunch of things His Word tells us not to.
Imagine enticing a child to do something wrong then punching [meant punishing] them for it or being upset about their action. The blame goes on the parent/God in this case.
Did Jesus clean up his own mess, or ours? Belief in evolution really calls the answer to this into question. It’s almost as if we share the blame with God who took it upon Himself to rectify the situation.
Which only underscores the force of the topic. If God wants all that, giving us the inclination to make stupid decisions is the problem. OP is not asking why we have free will. OP is asking why God made us inclined to sin or engage in sinful behaviors (via evolution) with our free will? This is not how parenting is done IMHO so I don’t see the analogy. Letting a child fail and learn from their mistakes is one thing, but rigging the game and helping them fail is another.
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“If God hates sin, why would he create humans with a propensity to sin?”
Premises of this question rejected.
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God did not create us with any such propensity. God created us with free will. Why? Because we are created for a parent-child relationship and that requires free will.
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Your premise regarding what is sin isn’t clear. But in my case, I take sin to mean self-destructive habits. In which case, it is obvious why God wouldn’t like His children to have these things which damage and degrade their potential, free will, and happiness.
So… you might as well ask why parents don’t lobotomize (by surgery or drugs) their children if they don’t like their children to do crazy, dangerous, and self-destructive things. If parents did such a thing we would consider them to be very bad parents, right?
This does not follow even if you said “ONLY used evolution to create humans.” But since I believe we are more than just a biological species, I don’t think this is the case anyway.
Frankly this is like saying, if parents let their children go to school, learn, and make their own choices about anything then children don’t ruin their own lives with crime and drugs.
Your characterization is irrational, which makes this either a fatuous strawman or a consequence of your own failure to understand. This is typical of the views people have of religions different than their own… which suggests the question… what is your religion?
So the point jpm is making is that with evolution all living things have a part in their own creation. God is a shepherd and teacher not a watchmaker and designer. Thus we make our own choices and share in the responsibility for what we become. This makes more sense of Christian theology rather than less.
There was a fall, because we misused the unique gifts God gave us alone. God was looking forward to a better outcome than this (as we see in Genesis 6 where it says God was sorry He made us … i.e the outcome was not what He desired).
Neither do I. It is inherent in any organisms which form any kind of community.
Evolution is life. Life is not a magical element added to inanimate objects except in dreams and fantasies like Walt Disney’s “Magicians Apprentice.” There is no such stuff which can be added to give something life. There is only the self organizing phenomena that happens as a consequence of the nonlinearity of natural law.
So… yeah… the creation of life was not only part of the plan the whole time, but the whole point of creating the universe in the first place.
Yes. They are listed in Genesis 3.
- We acquired an adversary.
- The relationships between men and women were distorted.
- Pain in childbirth was increased.
- We were required to live more by our own efforts and the consequences of our own actions.
- Our relationship with God was damaged.
I think there were good reasons for all of these.
The only pre-fall humans were Adam and Eve. There were homo-sapiens all over the globe. But our inheritance of the mind from God came through Adam and Eve as did the self-destructive habits from the fall.
Christianity is a very wide spectrum, especially in regards to this issue because answers on this question are not a part of any definition of Christianity or a part of any authoritative teaching in Christianity.
It would be a little like asking how physics deals with questions regarding the political problems of the middle east.
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What makes you think God hates sin?
Is it because you do? Or do you thnk that Good automatically hates evil?
Ignoring the Evolutionary red Herrig. How God created us is not really important. It is the existence of sin that seems to be the problem.
It sort of boils down to what is sin?
People seem to act as if sin has some sort of form or even consciousness. That it can either infect or control a person. Sin has none of these. it is a concept or part of theology. In essence it i the evil equivalent of doing Good, ie doing evil.
Now God could have made it so that it was impossible to do evil. That is what the traditional view of the New earth is. A place where evil cannot exist. But such an autocratic decision affects everything. It also depends on your definition of evil As was pointed out earlier
IOW we define sin as much if not more so than God does. The Bible even suggests that being naked is sinful.
Let’s just assume htat God wanted to create a society who would choose to be good and, hopefully , follow His ideals (commands?) For that choice to be valid, there has to be an alternative. IOW if there is no chance of evil you cannot choose not to do it.
Sin becomes an inevtabiltiy not a creative choice. You cannot have good without evil. You cannot choose God if there is no alternative.
God always knew about the probability of sin but instead of having a set of punishments oin place He decided to offer the opportunity to regret or understand that it was wrong and pay a sort of penalty charge (sacrificial System) or ultimately to offer forgiveness through Christ to cancel it altogether. Is that the actions of someone who Hates sin? or someone who acknowledges the inevitability of sin?
Christianity is very good at making people feel guilty about doing wrong. Or suggesting that we need to do something about th wrongs we have done, or even suggesting that we are just evil by nature. But all this is human justice and human values and human dogma.
God does not hate sin for sins’ sake. God just prefers people to choose good. But,
God has provided a means of canceling out sin. He has forgiven all sins through Christ.
He has not said that sin cannot be done. But He has said that it does not have to control your life, or you have to be perpetually paying for what you have done.
Perhaps this gives you a different perspective on sin,
If sin is just a byproduct of living, it becomes less of a problem in terms of its existence.
Richard
The flip side of this discussion is we also evolved with a sense of reciprocal altruism.
Another scapegoat for God created by some fellow EC here . You have no evidence backing up your argument. Who says God didn’t insist morals before even the evolution to people but where hidden somehow until evolution ?
What part of the bible talks directly about free will?
If that is so, why do we not act on it?
I think most people would consider the general behaviour to be selfish not selfless
Richard
Great question (hi, Nick!) Do you think that punishment implies free will? I don’t know.
One additional note to what has already been commented: what if God created the best possible world?
Some combinations seem to be unavoidable. If you have free will, then you must have a possibility to make a ‘wrong’ decision, something with bad consequences.
There may be other unavoidable(?) combinations, like if tectonic plates move, that causes damage and sometimes suffering and deaths. I am not an expert in geology, so I cannot say how necessary it was to make a geologically active planet but that is what we have.
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Hi Randy!!
Can you elaborate further what you mean? I’m kinda confused on the question sorry
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