I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, sorry!
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Morality isn’t the key to ultimate salvation.
What is it about evolution that is not absolutely necessary? The choice is between us being a product of design which can only produce tools and machines, and us being a product of our own learning which we give the name evolution when it comes to the origin of the species.
I did respond to that above.
But our resurrected body is a product of our own choices. That is the whole point of religion – that our actions have consequences after death which cannot be escaped. The resurrection is no different. Read 1 Corinthians 15. Paul’s explanation is NOT that God creates another body. His explanation is that the spiritual resurrected body grows from the physical/natural body, like a plant from a seed.
Evolution is just the learning process on the species level. It is how the species developed. Do you use the word evolution for how an embryo grows into a baby or how a baby grows into an adult. The learning process is very similar. We try different things and sometimes we fail – even die. If we survive then we have learned.
I agree. 
I’m confused though because I don’t think that’s what I meant when I was asking my questions. Salvation comes from God’s righteousness, not our own morality. But God did still make us beings that can rationalize and have the capacity for moral decisions. The question is whether evolution is required for God to make us this way.
Sorry. Evolution is the only way the capacity for morality can be got to. That’s incidental to us getting to intentionality, the capacity to think about thinking and communicate our thoughts. To be aware of our mortality. Being a person. Having a nature that can tell a story of experience. That’s all that God needs to glorify. I suspect He can glorify the most rudimentary loci of sensitivity. Sparrows are far from rudimentary. Every cloven worm.
What is it about evolution that is not absolutely necessary?
That’s a difficult question and one I can’t answer to be honest. Firstly, because I don’t consider myself a theistic evolutionist (yet). I’m still very much exploring and as of now, I still consider myself an Old Earth Creationist so I wouldn’t right now say evolution is necessary, but it could be.
The question is why and whether the answer is convincing. I agree that what is necessary according to God’s desires and purpose is to fashion a creature in His image that has (1) the capacity for free will (2) the capacity for love and (3) the capacity for moral decision making amongst other things of course. I don’t think that God simply miraculously creating a human like this goes against those three points as long as the human still has the ability to change, learn and explore. A baby learns and grows but it doesn’t make a transition between baby and non-baby after birth. That’s a bit of a bad analogy though.
I mean, in a way God did “poof” the universe into existence. It still is expanding, growing, changing, evolving (if you will), but it was still created ex nihilo. First it wasn’t there and then there was a Big Bang from nothing. It was made full of possibilities. So, in the same way I don’t see why God couldn’t create a human ex nihilo or from dirt or whatever which then has a capacity for learning, curiosity and change, full of possibilities. I wouldn’t say that creating something from nothing necessarily infers that that creation is some kind of dream-like thing without thought or will. God also created angels with free will and they aren’t bound by natural laws or evolution. Further, is God free? I mean, God is the thing bound by nothing except His own righteousness.
What I mean is, I think this question is more on the philosophical side. My question is more like - assuming evolution is necessary (for whatever reason), what relation does this have to the New Creation, our new bodies, our new minds, etc.? If a human being has to have evolved to be free, doesn’t this mean our resurrected bodies need to evolve too? (This is rhetorical, as you already gave me your answer). I find it really fascinating and appreciate your answers
I personally believe in a physical redeemed and restored Earth, not a completely new spiritual creation with no physical relation to ours. So I think that’s why this question of the parallels between our first creation and our (re)creation seem relevant to me. I don’t think our new natures are going to be vastly different from Adam’s original one, except that it has been perfected to God’s righteousness through Christ’s nature.
Anyway forgive my ramblings haha. It’s certainly super interesting to speculate.
Okay thanks, so you believe evolution is necessary for morality. So how do you see the resurrection? (Sorry if I already asked you this, all the comments on this post are kind of blending together in my head haha). Why doesn’t our resurrected selves need to evolve to have the capacity for morality/free will, etc. if we needed evolution originally to have those things?
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Our caterpillar minds will wake up in a butterfly. We’ll ALL be fully de- and re-constructed mentally, in therapy, so that we can fly. Evolution is for nature. Glorification is for supernature.
Except… then they are not a product of their own choices. If they are just what God made them to be then God is more responsible for what they choose than they are. Our choices are not made in a vacuum, but in the context of all the choices already made. If God made all the previous choices then the freedom of the choices which follow are extremely limited. You say… “as long as we have the ability to change, learn and explore”… but I don’t get this idea of God giving everything only up to a point and then suddenly stopping and having us suddenly make our own decisions. It is a fake free will… like being set up, frankly.
As for love and morality… if we are just acting according to how God made us then is it really love or morality? That just sounds like programming to me. If the programming is inadequate then that is the fault of the programmer.
AND BTW I am not saying that God has no role at all. It is just the role of a shepherd, teacher, or parent, rather than a designer. One who participates in a relationship with us. After all, even though we make our own choices and learn our own lessons, we do not do so in a vacuum. We do so in an environment which includes all kinds of influences including many shepherds and teachers.
I get what you’re saying, but I just disagree. In a way, we do this to our children as well. We shape them, teach them, we pass on our genes even. They are little copies of us in the most pure sense but then there still comes a point where they are developed enough to form their own opinions, their own thoughts because of their mind and free will. Then we “release” them into the world so to speak, hoping our influence and imprint on their lives will help them make the best decisions.
Also, when it comes to evolution, surely God already knew what was going to happen. He knew the end goal of what humans were going to be like, in His image. He ordained for it to happen, so in a way (in my opinion), it’s not much different to Him simply shaping someone with the same cognitive and mental abilities. What I mean is, we are who God made us to be, even with evolution. We are created to love, and have individual personalities, etc. It’s not just because some ancestor of ours decided to do something in the past that made us who we are today. That might have been the mechanism/means to get here, but if God desired us to be like this, then in the end it was because He created the universe in such a way that He knew we would evolve to be in His image. Of course we are also a product of our environment. I don’t think that’s in conflict with my line of thinking. As long as we would have been made to also be able to be influenced by our environment and have agency over our own thoughts then I think that is also free-will. Also, in evolution, aren’t people also really bound down by the mechanisms or manerisms that we gained through evolution? We also don’t have 100% free-will on everything, because we act in the context of how we’ve been “programmed” through the evolutionary process. Sure, our ancestors had a choice in what they did. But it wasn’t “me” who made those choices, it was someone else. So in a way, I’m bound by someone else’s choice as well.
Also, I’m not saying this to say I think this is why evolution is wrong. I guess I’m just arguing that I don’t think if God had poofed us into existence, that would mean we have zero free will. Hope that makes sense!
But they are not copies of us at all. They are completely unique.
But all that comes from living not instantaneous creation, where they have been learning and making their own choices.
And sometimes they are hoping their determination to be different from us and not make our mistakes will be enough for them to avoid those mistakes. Sometimes the lesson learned is not what we seek to teach.
That is where our real differences are to be found. If you think the future is already written then you already think we are no different from a the character in a novel God has written. I believe the whole point of free will is that with God we write the future together in mutual discovery. That is a real relationship. I think God only knows what we will do before we do it when sin has destroyed our free will. As robots under the control of our sins we become very predictable.
I don’t see any difference in that case either. But I wouldn’t call that free will… or morality… or love. And I don’t think there would be any experience of consciousness either.
It is still free will because it wasn’t God who made those choices.
I do definitely believe that God gives us free will. I’m not a fan of the idea of God determining everything in the future, and I do think we have genuine free will. However, at the same time, assuming that God did use evolution to create mankind, I do believe that He guided it, and created the world in such a way (laws of physics, etc.) that the end goal was a fully-formed Earth, full of life and for humans to be in His image. I do think that God in His mind knew what being in His image was to look like, or what kind of ecological system would have to evolve to hold the diversity of life we have. That didn’t happen all at once but I think God had a design in mind and guided the world towards that. And yeah, I do think that in His divine knowledge of all possible futures, He guided humans to look and have the intelligence/capabilities we have as people. I don’t think that’s in conflict with the idea of Him also giving us - as fully created beings - free will to now use our knowledge and will independently of Him. I also don’t think that the idea of evolution in some way requiring the act of homonid or whatever freedom stands in the way of God still guiding and knowing what the end goal is. To me, it’s the same as God’s will of the Kingdom of God, His righteousness and salvation. He still gives us the free will to decide and we can thwart His will and the Holy Spirit, but His goal of ushering in His Kingdom will happen.
On the other topics, I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree if that’s alright I do really appreciate your input and I hope you don’t take my disagreement to think I don’t. To be honest, I have a lot to mull over and digest now (I’ve never quite discussed theistic evolution in so much detail) and I’m prone to overthinking. I can imagine my beliefs of these topics will change over the next few years or so as I let it sit in my mind. However, I just need to find a way to make it all make sense in my head too as there are some things I do feel strongly about theologically haha.
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I certainly believe God was involved, but as a shepherd rather than a designer, because life is not just a clockwork mechanism and free will is not just a piece of magic added at the end. There is no stuff which can be added to living matter to give it free will any more than there is stuff which can be added to dead matter to make it alive. Growth and learning is what life is. And more we grow and learn the greater our awareness and free our will becomes.
With good parents the aim is not control to make your children fulfill your dreams but to focus on what will help them to fulfill their dreams. Likewise, what was important for God in evolution was not to make them fit some painting by Sallman of a blonde blue-eyed Jesus, as if such trivialities could possibly be of any importance. The aim was for things of much greater importance like language, empathy, and cooperation.
Capabilities? yes. Look? No.
God’s way of doing things both in the Bible and in evolution is not one of control but of correction. Noah’s flood and the extinction of the dinosaur are good examples of this. It is not about making us fit some predetermined picture but about putting a stop to things when we are clearly going in an unhelpful destructive direction. Otherwise we are free to make our own choices and learn what we can.
This is probably a much more fundamental issue of philosophy, between a repressive version of Christianity which condemns all human activities but worship and one which rejoices in all the art, music, science, and creativity which we are capable of. I cannot support or think of the former as either healthy or good. I definitely think God rejoices in the latter. The religion which makes obedience the highest good is more useful to those seeking to use it for their own gain and power. But I think God is more interested in seeing what our free will can accomplish when we are free from our self-destructive habits.
Of course. As I have said elsewhere, I believe diversity is a sign of life. And I think our diversity of thought is as essential to the survival of human civilization (or the survival of Christianity even) as the diversity of our genetics is essential to the survival of the species.
As you mentioned earlier, our children and even ourselves are the product of the natural process of biological reproduction. Our genomes are the result of genes that were shuffled around during the natural process of meiosis with the addition of a few new mutations, and the two gametes that ultimate got together were the result of what we would consider luck (in the “roll of the dice” sense that humans relate to it). If this isn’t an existential problem for Christianity, then evolution shouldn’t be a problem either because it is just a repeat of this same process over many more generations.
Oh no I agree. I wasn’t trying to argue evolution is inconsistent with Chrisianity. I was just discussing the idea that some Christians hold which says evolution the necessary tool God used to make us (He could not have made us any other way to be in His image etc.). And how this idea relates to God creating ex nihilo in our resurrection.
For the record . . . I wasn’t trying to say that you are saying that evolution is inconsistent with Christianity. I was talking in generalities. Sorry if that wasn’t clear in my post.
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A hundred trillion, order of magnitude. Along each germline: 10^30 x. With 10,000 genes per organism. With, what, 1:1000 (0.001:1) mutations per organism.
10^40-50 mutations.
In general, there seems to be a noticeably restricted use of miracles in the Bible. In everyday experience, miracles (defined as something not following known natural laws) are rather uncommon; historical records also support that impression. Even where miracles occur, they seem to just cover what they need to. Thousands are fed with a few loaves and fish, but the leftovers are carefully saved. Demands for a sign are often rejected, and the idea of a quick solution to hunger is rejected. Using evolution as the process of creating the kinds of organisms fits with that general pattern. It also parallels the gradual process of revelation, building throughout the Old Testament to the culmination in the New Testament.
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A fascinating mixture of objectivity and piety. Could God have not so chosen? At which point in history? Did He so choose? And how? What was the calling? What is corporate humanity? What could it have ‘freely’ done otherwise with its (entirely natural) moral and spiritual capacities? Fallen from what? We naturally nurture ourselves in to what we are by nature. How’s that offer going for God? As well as it is for N.W. European enlightenment? Such as it is?