that’s a great question. I don’t know the answer. Sometimes, with all the natural disasters and seemingly senseless tragedies, we tend to hope that some of this is random.
There are reasons that we can think God doesn’t interfere in some details, too, I think. I don’t know all of therm, though… It’s a hard question.
Thanks.
It certainly seems to be necessary to enabling the mind to function. Damage to the brain which the body can survive can make it impossible for the mind to manifest any longer. Whether the brain is sufficient in itself for consciousness is not clear. If consciousness is something ever present but which depends on states of matter in life to achieve higher states would it really make any difference to that question? So long as the potential for consciousness is a constant then the material organization in a living brain should be both necessary and sufficient for the mind.
That is one of key points as I see it. In medical practice, having seen hundreds of people with brain injury whether due to stroke, trauma, dementia of various sorts, or tumors, it is very obvious the brain structure is essential to thought and personality. That of course brings up the questions of the nature of the mind after death, to which I have no good answers from a Christian perspective, other than the vague properties of the new creation.
Here is how all of evolution can seemly fit with in a literal 7 day creation:
basically gen 1 is a 7 day over view, and ending day 6 with man made in the image of god (no soul). This version of man could have very well evolved, and been waiting outside the garden this whole time.
Chapter 2:4 is the being of the garden only narrative. this narrative happens at the same time the 7 days of creation are happening. the true beginning of chapter two starts verse 4 and describes mid day on day 2 to be the start of the garden only narrative, and ends mid day three. So everything in the garden happens in one of god creation days. remember most all of chapter 2 is garden narrative only.
meaning aside from the very first part of chapter 2 that describes day 7 the day of rest the rest of chapter two describes what only took place in the garden. it STARTS with the creation of a man named Adam. Adam was made of mud and given a soul. from Adam God made eve.
then next thing of note there is no time line between chapter 2 and chapter 3. so while Adam and eve via the tree of life they did have access to, remain the same in the garden with god. while, everything outside the garden ‘evolved’ till about 6000 years ago where chapter three describes the fall of man. this is why the genologies stop 6000 years ago.
then Adam and eve are expelled and have children which bring us to your Question… where did abel’s wife come from? the simple answer is…
She from her parents who were the descendants of day 6 man. who could have very well evolved outside the garden just like science says…
I do have a video goes into much more detail if you like
Why would we want to force the Bible into an interpretation contrary to what God tells us in all the data He sends us from the earth and sky? Why would we want to force the Bible to be contrary to the findings of science which demonstrably works in all of modern technology and medicine? Why would we want to return to the filth, immorality, and ignorance of the dark ages of mankind?
did you even read my post?
What i provided does not force anything on either side. i point out where and how it is possible for both to have happened as more or less each side demands. It seems to me you took my title and filled in your own assumptions. When infact i provide the time needed for both a literal 7 day creation and a 100 bazillion year evolution if needed.
I don’t see any title. Yes I stopped with the statement which made me lose interest in the rest of your post and I explained why. Perhaps if you had said something more like this in that statement I would have read more… will do so now.
There is no time line between chapter 1 and chapter 2 but there certainly is a timeline between chapters 2 and 3. It makes no sense whatsoever to claim that evolution happens after chapter 2. That doesn’t agree with the data God sends us either, so my objection still applies.
I do believe in an historical Adam and Eve around 6000 years ago (10,000 at most since that is when we have evidence for the beginning of agriculture). But I certainly do not believe Adam and Eve were golems of dust and bone as if God were some kind necromancer. Nor do I believe in magical fruit or talking animals, so I see no reason to treat this story literally when even Bible doesn’t do so.
Of course it is. Just as it is to us. Quantum indeterminacy is real. There is no lack of information, there are no hidden variables. RoS is real too at the other end of the scale.
Lewis’s point about logic is that we cannot use logic to prove the validity of logic. It is a presumption, a given. If we are strictly the result of evolution, why should we trust logic? It may be that it just makes us more fit and adaptable and has nothing to do with truth and that it is only in our evolved perception and imagination that it does.
On the other hand, we use logic to study, test and examine nature – it is above and super to nature, it is, strictly speaking, supernatural.
Welcome to the forum and the conversation. There is never a lack of opinions here, but we always have room for one more.
Your reading of Genesis 1-3 is interesting in that it tries to reconcile an old earth with a literalistic interpretation. I think a lot of people have done that one way or another, and indeed there are many including Dr. John Walton who subscribe to a literal Adam and Eve while accepting evolution and and old earth. It does make some of the problems disappear that have to be accounted for if you take Eden as symbolic or metaphorical, such as the genealogies and Paul’s treatment of Adam. However, it also raises questions also, such as days without the sun, order of creation and history revealed in creation; Then in Genesis 2-3, the problems of the story reading more as myth than literal with talking animals, magic trees, etc. with Eden seemingly separated from what we know about material reality.
Regardless of how literal it is, the lessons learned are theological, that is, they are revealing the message God has for us and had for the original audience. It is difficult at times to see past our preconceptions to see what truths God has for us in that message, but discussions like this are helpful.
Is that as weird as it looks Mark? It’s perfectly clear that brain is sufficient for consciousness, as that’s all there is. No matter… how grounded. As with all of nature. Nothing’s missing is it. There is no consciousness signal or field is there? For a brain antenna? I mean it’s OK for folk religion to be vitalistic, but there’s no rational gap is there?
That might be right. But is there a tidy rational way to explain how matter gives rise to consciousness? I would have always said consciousness arises as a biproduct of an organism’s cognitive functioning, no more in need of explaining than digestion. But I’m not so sure of that now. It would make Occam happy but now it seems a little too convenient, hasty and possibly circular as reasoning goes.
Doesn’t it seem just a little bit questionable in seeking to understand consciousness to dismiss out of hand any possibility that doesn’t ground subjective experience as emerging from the material world? How that emerging could possibly take place is the hard problem. No one knows. An alternative explanation is that consciousness in some broad sense - so not specifically the human variety - is a co basic aspect of the cosmos along with matter/energy and space/time. Just as water can be liquid, solid or gas depending on local conditions so might not consciousness manifest in one way in a plant, another in a rock and more interestingly (at least to us) in living organisms with brains?
Of course the brain isn’t an antenna receiving a mind-signal from God-knows-what. But is there any kind of signal which could possibly animate a dead brain or even provide for a slime mold the drive toward creaturely homeostasis? I’m not so sure.
There is no reason to be agnostic that matter does mind. Here we are. Where’s the uncertainty? Why? What inconvenience are we hastily avoiding? If that’s circular then everything is.
It’s syntactically questionable but not semantically. Anaxagoras’ C5th BCE proposition is utterly superfluous, explains nothing at all at infinite cost.
And no, no signal but an intentional supernatural one could, semantically, animate a dead brain. An external signal needed by myxomycophyta is ID without the I or the D. They generate their own. Just like nature harmonizes in the keys of c, e, G and h.
I think I’ve identified your thesis statement but I’m not finding any support aside from incredulity that anyone should question it. I know well the feeling but am deliberately setting aside that bewitchment to focus on the hard problem. Now I’m focused on just how matter does consciousness if it does. So I’m setting aside “because obviously it must” and leaning instead toward “because consciousness is always already there latently and when the material support is right can even become self aware and sapient”. But it starts with creaturely homeostasis, something no AI programmed to audition for Touring’s approval seems anywhere close to possessing.
Good luck with that. Where are you going to start looking for witchery? Not here presumably.
Begin looking for witchery? That would be like my suggesting you might see things more clearly if you spent less time using yoga to perform a direct colorectal exam.
I was just picking up your ball of bewitchment and running the other way.
I think that is the wrong terminology, like suggesting that air gives rise to sound and water gives rise to waves. The medium is not the causal explanation for things which exist in that medium. It reminds me of the old spontaneous generation idea that mud gave rise to frogs, old rice gave rise to mice, and rotting meat produces flies. Consciousness is the product of a long developmental process and while the medium is necessary, it is hardly sufficient.
A standard technique is to look at the simplest example of something in order to isolate the essence. So in the simplest organisms we see interconnected chemical cycles in self-organizing dynamic structures which communicate information about itself and its environment with chemical signals in order to initiate responses to those conditions such as repair or fight/flight responses.
Now an important part of this is to understand how self-organizing systems work. For these are not deterministic. instead the nonlinearity drives the system into bifurcations points where choices are made between many possible states/structures. This sets up the exploratory part of the learning process which the survival criterion of natural selection filters to produce adaptive responses. This is important because this context adds the intentional and responsible characteristics to these responses as well as meaning to the things it responds to. They are not programmed responses because the organism is not a product of design. The organism has found and chosen these responses in adaptation for survival in a process of learning.
I suggest this is the barest bones of consciousness to which additional abilities are added to improve upon it in many different ways. Of course some of these advances are huge – expanding awareness of self and environment in speed, scope, and quality as well as expanding the range of responses – consciousness greater by many orders of magnitude.
BTW we can do something similar with the idea of intelligence and for this I would see our simplest example of intelligence in how AI works. And then the barest bones it seems to me is simply the ability to follow a set of rules which suggests to me that this is even more fundamental than consciousness because it is found in the very elementary particles of matter. Again to these barest bones much is added by many orders of magnitude from other abilities. In this I see an echo of MarkD’s idea of consciousness in found in matter itself – to suggest that it is not consciousness but intelligence which is everywhere. It may seem strange to see intelligence as more fundamental than consciousness, but when I see AI defeating us and even teaching us in our most difficult games and challenges of intelligence, I find it difficult to come to any other conclusion.
Yes. There is a similar problem with materialistic unidimensional guesses about the existence of God or ‘God-belief’.
“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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