I do not know of another word for it.
Jack Frost is anthropmorphising winter, whehter he has human charachteristics or not. it is just giving winter a body, form and indeoendance.
I did not think that anthropmorphisising was to make human.
So give me another word to use.
Richard
There is the word “animate,” which just means “to bring to life”. But that isn’t true of gravity so, I don’t see how that works either. But perhaps that is a better choice even so. Consider the connection to the word “animism” where people attribute spirits to inanimate objects.
Jack frost is a personification of winter and it is definitely anthropomorphizing, i.e. giving human characteristics to it. By making human, this is in contrast to other things known in nature not in contrast to aliens for example, who may have many characteristics in common with humans.
We are probably indulging in word play, but…
I always saw animate as giving movement rather than giving life or independance. I suppose we are in the realm of Pinochio?
I think the point here is that many people want to give sin a physical presece and reality that makes it infect, or affect byt its own volition so that the person hs no choice but to succomb. It is worse than a virus because there seems to be no human or self cure.
What I object to with Original Sin and, to a relative exstent your habit alternative, is that God made us not only vulnerable but unable to resist them. It negates freedom if the evil nature cannot be avoided and makes God devious. He claims to give us freedom but allows a vulnerability that ony he can cure. You end up with McCaffee infecting computers with a virus only they can remove. It does not reflect well on God.
God must have made us with the capacity for either good or evil not just evil.
(as I see it)
Richard
‘Reify’
Some-one with your claimed background ought to know that the prefix ‘anthrop-’ (as in anthropology, anthropophagi, anthropoid) means ‘human’.
To make something more concrete or real
does not go far enough.
People are claiming independant thought and control by sin and or eveil.
Anthro may mean human, but in terms of understanding that is closer than just animate or reify.
What we need is a tern for self contol and independance. Animas have that without being human, granted, so what would be the right term in this case? it is not reify.
It would be somewhere between animate and Genesis where by something is given indeendant life.
In reality anthro might well work because the charachteristics given to sin match (the worse of) humanity all too well.
Richard
Exactly!
Habits are good just as much as they are bad. Without good habits we would have no capacity for multi-tasking… to say the least. God made us to be self-programing entities and habits are just the programs we write for ourselves.
It is likely more of an artifact of language coming from its primary usage in a social environment. Thus it sounds like we are seeing machines, clouds, mountains, and many other things as things with a will and an intention. But if you ask the people, you find that is not what they meant. I don’t think most people actually think sin and/or evil have a will or intention of their own. But this does not mean they don’t have characteristics in common with living things because they are a part of living things. Thus sin and evil do grow and multiply almost like a living thing, even though it is not a living thing.
It is the universal problem with power. Power for good and power for evil always go hand in hand. Life should be easy? Well, it is easier with those who have less power… bugs and worms, plants and fish, cats and dogs. All have it so much easier. Is it fair? LOL LOL LOL
Anyway I think it is a fundamental truth taught by Christianity that sin and evil is not something we can solve all by ourselves let alone with just a little education. Thus the need for redemption and divine help.
Can there be personification without anthropomorphizing?
“Animate” might be better for how Paul treats sin/evil; he ascribes actions but I don’t recall him ascribing motivations, which would be essential to call it personification.
I’d say you’re reading that into things. Sin has no volition, regardless of whether it is an entity or force of some sort; it has no will because all it “wants” is falling short of the glory of God (one of scripture’s definitions of sin).
Dredging up memory of a conversation with a Benedictine monk (whose specialty, interestingly, was Augustine and Luther) . . . . Even Augustine, he asserted, didn’t say that sin couldn’t be resisted, just that it couldn’t consistently be resisted, in other words that people might resist ninety-nine times then fail on the one hundredth. Indeed even that we talk in terms of resisting sin implies that sin is a force that is consistently present to some extent or another.
That fits with how Paul talks about sin, calling us slaves to sin.
Though I would suggest that we’re not better slaves to sin than to righteousness; we can’t seem to be consistent in following either one.
“Control” may be too strong a word – “constrained” might be better. And even “control” does not necessarily imply personality; a magnet can control things.
A pastor with a physics degree suggested that sin is like (the popular conception of) a black hole: the pull is irresistible, but you don’t automatically fall in – after all, black holes don’t suck things up, they just sit there and influence.
Which strikes me . . . even Augustine didn’t in practice believe in original sin as is ascribed to him since he related that he did engage in some acts of righteousness, just that he didn’t do them out of righteousness but for his own sake. That’s really where the matter of “doing good” comes in, that even when we do good we have an ulterior motive, that to some degree we do good things for self-satisfaction. It’s where the Wittenburg Reformers drew the line between “civil righteousness” and “theological rightouesness”, or as we might say between things that are good in terms of this world and things that are good in terms of heaven. A Lutheran pietist preacher once noted that saying we are captives of sin doesn’t mean we can’t get a 99% score, the issue is that it isn’t 100%.
Habits as self-programming – I like it.
Or if they do it’s more like an appetite, not a motive; sin’s/evil’s appetite would be things/people falling short of the glory of God, not anything in particular. In other words, sin doesn’t drive one to be an arson, it just drives one to fail God in some way.
So that could apply to Paul’s language – and to that of the Orthodox, where sin is treated as a disease.
Amen.
This might be a better analogy than you think, because the reality is that getting swallowed by a black hole is harder than most people think. You really have to aim for these things quite precisely or it doesn’t happen. Yeah they have a strong gravitational force but there is a problem with angular momentum and the tendency in space to keep moving in the same direction (no friction).
So you are most likely just to go whizzing past one of these with a considerably altered direction rather than getting swallowed up by them. But if you get too close, there is that accretion disk of things colliding with each other so that reduced angular momentum allows you to be pulled further in. Close enough and the tidal forces will tear you apart. And when you get sucked into the black hole it is by pieces which are left of you.
That is just cynical
I do good for its own sake, not for mine or for reward. That is the Christian way promoted by Christ. Paul is too fixed on the prize for my liking.
Richard
Or if you get close enough your mass becomes part of the Schwarzschild equation and the black hole expands (which I’m told is the primary way in which they do so). One lecturer said that “accretion disk” is a misnomer, that it should be called an “absorption disk” because matter never actually falls in, the radius expands.
Doesn’t that depend on the radius involved? My udderstanding is that for a large enough black hole, ‘spaghettification’ doesn’t happen until within the event horizon (if there is a “within”).
That doesn’t even make sense. The mass doesn’t get added to the black hole in order to increase the Schwarzschild radius until the mass enters the Schwarzschild radius.
The resultant velocity from collisions in the accretion disk is random and a result near zero (rare as that may be) means the mass will fall into the black hole (if there are no further collisions).
Perhaps he meant to say the majority of mass gets absorbed by this increase of radius rather than by actually falling into the radius by means of collisions. Was he by chance speaking of supermassive black holes?
Yes, I think that is correct. The supermassive black holes are different. This is because the Schwarzschild radius (proportional to mass) increases faster than the radius for a given gravitational acceleration (proportional to square root of mass).
This was explained on Quora by a working PhD physicist; I’m not that good at explaining it.
But matter joins a black hole primarily by the fact that when the matter along the event horizon becomes dense enough, it plus the matter already absorbed by the hole change the Schwarzschild radius and that new matter ‘finds itself’ on the inside. Only rarely does any mass actually fall into the hole.
I don’t think he specified, except that it was a matter of how black holes grow, and that they must have a dense accretion disk to grow significantly.
He showed some math, and that the Schwarzschild radius changes when matter near the event horizon gets close enough.
Ah. That may be a bit more recent than what I found when I looked it up, which said the mass increases only when mass falls inside the S radius.
Just seemed like the difference would increase with mass. Compare a graph of line through the origin with a square root. So for supermassive black holes the increase in S radius would be much greater than the radius of constant acceleration. For normal sized black holes (like the simulations I have run), if you can see the S-radius then you are already dead (due to the tidal forces of gravity).
Around the time of the Out of Africa expansion, there were about 50,000 H. sapiens scattered mostly across eastern and southern Africa.
Okay. We agree Genesis 2-3 isn’t literal history. The consequences at the end are mythological anachronisms except for one – expulsion from the Garden of God’s presence. This turn of events metaphorically represents everyone’s feeling of alienation from God once one has chosen selfish interests over what one knows to be right. Every human being has been down that path.
Okay. What I’m trying to tell you is that belief doesn’t require a single couple or group of people chosen by God. Take your conclusion and apply it to the small population of sapiens existing in Africa around 65,000 years ago. All of them were fully human and already had souls, but they had collectively reached the point of brain, language, and symbolic development to achieve a “breakthrough” in human thought. It probably began with a tribe or clan, but because these small groups traded and communicated with each other, it quickly spreads to everyone. Everything works out the same in the end, no miracles or special pleadings necessary.
The premise was weird, not the question. You postulated a few humans with souls and the rest you refer to as animals because they lack a soul. Anyone would ask how the rest became fully human (or died out).
I’m not a fan of dualism either, and I’m fine with the latter half of Feser’s definition. I prefer Middleton’s description of us as a “complex unity” of body/soul.
Of course I agree race is a social, not a biological, construct.
Animals that looked like humans? I wish you could hear yourself. This is a hard no. There never were people who looked human and behaved like animals. Human behavior has progressed in lock-step across the spectrum since we appeared on the scene. The archaeological record says so, from the tools they made to the graphic symbols they left on cave walls to intentional burials with grave goods.
Of course the question of souls is speculation. But if you’re going to speculate about Adam & Eve and human evolution, expect to have your theory subjected to rational scrutiny. Your first two sentences are correct, but there’s no scriptural or scientific basis to believe it happened relatively recently in human history.
As I said before, every human is created in the image of God and, if you believe in the soul, endowed with one from creation. Gen. 1-2 depicts God’s creation of the first humans, not the selection of two special humans (or a group) from the rest. The only acceptable interpretation of Genesis, in my view, is that all of humanity from its beginnings was fully human, even if not fully mature. Every other answer creates more problems than it solves.
The question remaining for Christians is when did God create humanity. Some may limit it to H. sapiens, some (like William Lane Craig) may extend it to heidelbergensis and include Neanderthal. Going by the scriptural analogy of ha’adam naming the animals, I go with the most likely first speaker of words – H. erectus about 1 million years ago. Everyone since I would consider a member of the human family. How did God endow erectus with a soul? No idea. I’m in the same boat as you at that point.
Pascal and a lot of Christians in the past thought the same. The Thomist “rational soul.” I think it’s a category error. Even in Genesis 3, morality is the result of human choice, and the knowledge of good and evil is gained by experience. I’d also ask what is the connection between “rationality” (reason?) and the soul. Again, I’d point out that infants have souls but don’t have an ounce of rationality yet. People aren’t born with reason or the rules of logic. Toddlers have souls but have to be taught not to bite or steal from their siblings. Those things take time and experience to figure out, despite the presence of a soul.
I feel sorry for anyone who tries to argue for the survival of the intellect without the body. haha. If you identify rationality with the soul, the first statement is bare assertion that contradicts what Feser said, that “before death” the soul is “integrated with the body so as to make up a single complete substance.” Aristotle’s ancient philosophy aside, before death the intellect, the soul, and the body are an inseparable unity. Whether the intellect or the soul survives death is a question of faith, not science, and is improvable as the existence of God (also a question of faith).
Ummm, everything Pasnau says here is wrong.
So Adam is a tertiary belief. Agree.
Because humanity as a whole reached the point of moral maturity and made a selfish choice. It’s not hard to understand. Every single human child since the first has reached that point decided exactly as ha’issah (the woman) did.
This conflates two different accounts. One isn’t meant historically at all, the other might or might not be meant that way, and if it is it is not necessarily of the first humans, just a special pair.
Why do set this apart? To justify your theology perhaps?
Most people do not even believe in God, let alone feel alienated from Him. Those who do believe in God do not feel alienated from Him. That is Original Sin, it is not a pragmatic view of humanity. Christianity is the only faith that claims this. Most other faiths are about forging a relationship with God by trying to do what they think He wants. In truth, that is what Christianity is supposed to be doing also but a few people changed that and we like sheep have followed.
That I concur with.
Why? Why must we justify our faith to history or Science or rather the history science has decreed?
Oh great. Even human thought is self generated now. Where is God in your Genesis of humanity?
God is clearly not necessary.
You haven’t watched the images of people rioting.
Humans are not the advanced super race that you seem to think. We are perfectly capable of animal behaviour. But that does not make everyone animals in that way either. There is both good and evil in the world, and it is that simple point that you and al believers in Original Sin overlook. You decree something for humnity that is beyond your remit.
Go out and smell the roses, and while you are thre see how much decency there is in the world.
Human vanity. That is taking the words of genesis literally. We just love to think that we are Gods on earth.
And you appear to be taking a scientific approach to that. Why?
Do you really think God just sat and watched while apes changed and socialised (oh they still do) and gained language (Chimps do not converse verbally?) and became self aware (Hierachy is common in much of Nature).
If humans are set apart, there is only one reason: God. Unfortunately that reason is beyond the reach or identity of Science.
Science may not be the enemy of Religion but religion does not have to bow down to it or compromise because of it. There is no need to rectify belief to what science sees and decrees. Faith does not need proof, and that includes scientific proofs.
Richard
On this planet, most people do believe in God.
Not from what I see. It may have been true a couple of centuries ago If you exclude China) but not now.
But, perhaps there is emergence in other countries that I am not aware of? Then again, within the boundaries of the Christianity seen on this forum, anyone not following the Christian faith is not believing in the right God. I do not actually believe that, but there you go
I wonder why you felt it necessary to contradict me?
Perhaps you have an insight into how most people view God? Do you feel alienated from Him? Perhaps alienated is not the right word?
However, it is not whether a person feels alienated from God that matters, it is whether God is actually alienated, or just waiting and hoping for them to reach out too Him
Richard
“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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