In the beginning... God and time

Faith & Science Conversation
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When I was a child I prayed indeed that God would spare the life of my hamster - and it did not happen. Later I prayed he would not let my Grandma die - and it did not happen - and then I grew up and learned how to pray how to make a change to my reality in his name instead. Instead of asking God to heal someone who is in hospital or ill I ask him to help me in contributing to their healing - to drive their loved ones to see them - to cook a meal for them - cut their lawn… How many of us pray to God to help those in a disaster without reaching out to them ourselves?

you are clearly free of sin so you never did do that :slight_smile:

102

???

I have plenty of my own sins. Why in the world would you suggest that my lack of your particular sins mean that I am without? I wasn’t even raised to believe in God. It was a long time before the word “God” had much meaning for me at all. So, no, I did no such thing as you have done.

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Why are you looking at God from a very human centered perspective?

The Fathers of philosophy thought that change was bad and Being was good, so Being did not change. Thus their “God” of Being does not change. The problem with that is beings that are alive change. Those beings, who think and learn, grow and change the most.

Generally humans think that change in the form of growth is good. It says that Jesus grew in wisdom and height, and in favor with God and humans. The issue is that philosophy says categorically that change is bad and no change is good, while theology says that good change is good, and bad change is bad, or no positive change in a evil situation is bad.

I prefer to think that evolution, which is change, is normal and thus is basically good, but we need to guide it in a positive good direction as much as possible. God is in the best position to direct these good changes because God created the universe and knows best how it should work. We are participants, like it or not, because we are part of the universe, so we need to make the best of our lives, which is what God wants for us and everyone else

I really do not know why you seem to be fixated on immature faith. Of course some “Christians” are immature, and they need to pray for maturity. The biggest problem is selfish faith, which is a contradiction in terms. What we need is Christian education, not the condemnation of God as a Person who is able to help people with their most serious problems.

Does God care about the problems of people? YHWH revealed God’s Personal Holy Name, I AM WHO I AM, on the Mountain when YHWH asked Moses to lead God’s people out of slavery in Egypt because YHWH heard their cries for help.

You could also ask God to give the sick comfort in the midst of pain, hope in the midst of darkness. and the faith in the midst of sorrow.

104

Do you think he needs me reminding him?

105

how can we be made in the image of God and immediately fall from God’s favour?

106

good for you that you never asked God to change reality in your favour and and that you were given a sheltered life not having been exposed to prayers to Santa but credit me solely with this experience.

might be a place to start.

Sure we all have plenty of other sins to ponder about too but asking God to fulfill our wishes and then claiming to do so in the name of Jesus is one we can overcome.

robots can self maintain, have awareness, can grow and learn. Does that make them alive?
When the bible says that on the day adam and eve eat from the tree of realisation of good and evil, did they physically die on that day or did the manage to have children…
or were they declared dead because they realized their will in their physical body

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I said these are more important, I did not define life in this way.

I already defined life previously as a self-organizing system which maintains a structure apart from the environment and makes changes in its structures by bifurcation (choices). Self maintenance, awareness,growth, and learning all come from this as life multiplies because another important thing to recognize is that life is highly quantitative and enhanced by a number of things like hierarchical organization. Life weaves its way between the twin deaths of immunity to the environment and domination by the environment, to enhance both sensitivity and independence at the same time. The result is that living things maintain themselves not by invulnerability but by adaptation and are sensitive to the environment not by direct domination but by acquiring information about the environment. But the most important thing to understand is that life is a particular kind of process and NOT a kind of stuff or thing added to matter.

Robots are not self-organizing systems, they are designed - by definition. The medium is irrelevant. When we design things like viruses (with the same biochemistry as ourselves) to do tasks in medicine and engineering then the result is simply another kind of robot, not something which is alive because they are a product of design. And if an electronic or software system manages to come about by self-organization rather than design and maintains that organization making choices not because of programming but because of a bifurcation in their self-organization then they would also be alive (to the degree they self-organize) rather than just being a machine or robot. So while the machines, computers, and robots we have now do not fit my definition of life, I do not rule out the possibility that they may do so in the future.

GOD said that on the day they eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil they would surely die. But they did not physically die and this just points the fact that there are MANY places in the Bible where it speaks of two kinds of life (Luke 9:60 was another of them): physical life and spiritual life. Physical life is a process as I described above. Spiritual life is a connection with God, which I have also explained numerous time before. God created us for an eternal parent-child relationship with Him where there is no end to what God can give and no end to what we can receive. This is the essence of eternal life because only God has what is required to make an eternal existence worthwhile.

On the day Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, their relationship with God was broken by the only thing that can ever break a parent-child relationship, which is when the presence of the parent in the child’s life does more harm than good. To say the relationship was broken by disobedience is nothing but absurd for disobedience and making mistakes is the nature of children and part of the process by which they learn. Putting it down to disobedience is simply convenient for changing religion into a tool of power and manipulation. No what broke the relationship with God was the first self-destructive habit (and that is what sin is) of blaming everyone but themselves for their own mistakes, for this changed God from the perfect teacher into the perfect scapegoat. God had no choice but to cast them out in order to learn that there was no way of escaping the consequences of their own choices and mistakes.

108

Communication is good. God enjoys people talking to God.

Prayer is not for the benefit of God. Prayer is for the benefit of humans.

109

The difference between our two viewpoints seems quite simple: You believe God created humankind in a perfect state--already in His Image–from which they Fell. I believe He used evolution to create animals of gradually increasing complexity until, in the case of Homo sapiens, their brains were capable of abstract thought (i.e.Mind) and thus could choose to behave in ways that better reflected the nature of their Creator. Their failure to do so (i.e. their refusal of this Gift) could be called Sin, BUT it was NOT so much a Fall as it was a failure to Rise.

To hold this view and to maintain my Christian Faith, I have had to modify to some extent the orthodox belief in which I was brought up–chiefly in what it means that Jesus Christ is the Savior of mankind.

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is an evolved human just the way the rest of us are (i.e. really 100% human) BUT, by the time he reached maturity, he had achieved a level of Spirituality that uniquely set him aside as the Christ, the perfect Image of the Creator that had existed even before the Big Bang [John, 8:48-59; “before Abraham was born, I AM”] Jesus is our savior as he leads us to overcome the inherent selfishness of evolution and embrace a life of love and caring for our neighbors on this planet.
Al Leo

110

Mine is a different view from either. God created life itself in His image “good”, for in the ability of life to become more is the potential infinity to reflect God’s actual infinity. It is the nature and essence of life that it is the product of growth, evolution and learning rather than design. Only in that way could we be said to be more than simply what God made us to be, for we are the product of all the choices of our ancestors. But anyway, the purpose for this was a relationship and relationships depend on the ability to respond which simple life does not have a great deal of. So the image of God is perfected “very good” in man by His ability to communicate with God.

So God adopted Adam and Eve to give them a memetic inheritance by which they would be His children. But they were only perfect in the sense that they could have a parent child relationship with God, which means that their growth and learning were just beginning. In any case, the story in Genesis 2-3 tells how this parent-child relationship was broken, which initiated a long history of restoration culminating in Christ through which that parent-child relationship can be regained.

That sounds like an adoptionist Christology of man become God rather than God become man. A religion which shares this same Christology is the moonies. It is a convenient Christology when you want to declare your leader to be the second coming of Christ.

The orthodox view is that God became a helpless human infant and thus incarnated in the 100% human Jesus of Nazareth, while still being 100% the God who created the universe. I agree with Albert to degree that I think Jesus’ DNA was from union of a human mother and a human father and thus in that sense alone the product of evolution same as the rest of us.

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