Two questions about how central the question of origins is to your core beliefs

Faith & Science Conversation
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Mutations no… but we do see God’s influence in all kinds of things of our life. If in our life. then I don’t see any reason why it would not be in the lives of other living things as well, when it is important. But I would expect it to be limited to singular events rather than overall patterns.

Yes. Though consideration of some evolved abilities might have played a role in making that decision… like the evolution of the use of language.

No not much of it. But… created the universe? yes. Life? Well, life is a self-organizing process. So it would more an issue of making sure the right conditions occurred. And we do believe in a God who is involved in events so I would expect some intercessions (without breaking any laws of nature). But I don’t think conscious awareness and moral responsibility are supernatural gifts or entirely exclusive to human beings.

Why?

Can a communication from God be considered an historical event?

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I wonder why that would be? If He could do one, He could do both, but chose not to. So you believe He set in action the chemical and biological factors that could and would function as we now understand. Somehow, around 4 Bya the prokaryotes acquired organelles and by 2.5 Bya we had eukaryotes, and that worked fine for 2 B years. Then around 543 Mya, the Cambrian explosion occurred and new body forms evolved, finally getting us to who we are today. So we agree that God began the process, first 13.8 Bya with the universe, and then at the single-celled level 4 Bya. And His intervention since then, has been unnecessary. So logic, science and religion converge into one consistent concept.

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Yes, I agree there is an obvious connection between having the capacity to fill a vocation and being given a call to that vocation. Though I don’t think that humans evolving to a certain point triggered the calling, as if God had no choice in the matter. I think God picked his own timeline independent of how long humanity had certain capacities.

Yes, I don’t have a problem saying God guided and directed the course of evolutionary history and life developed according to his plan and will AND God didn’t tinker with evolutionary mechanisms, there are natural explanations for how things got from A to B. I don’t think we are ever going to come up with some kind of mechanistic explanation of God’s sovereignty over creation, so I’m content to just say I accept it as a truth claim.

As to the difference between intervening in human history, I think of that as relational intervention, not progressive creation. It would change the trajectory of human cultural development to encounter God and have divine truth revealed. But I don’t think it’s necessary that God intervened by tinkering supernaturally with DNA to intentionally bring about a certain version of humanity. I’m fine with the idea that in a parallel universe, highly advanced dolphins could have been the image of God.

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Sure. But we aren’t talking about what we think God could do, we are taking about what we think God did.

Yes. I also believe God has been intimately involved in the ongoing act of creating through evolution, but not in a way that we can mechanistically explain. I don’t think he supernaturally “intervenes” in natural evolutionary processes, but I don’t think natural processes proceed independent of God’s sustaining will. I’m content with the mystery of randomness not being random to God, but also God is not front-loading everything with a predetermined destiny either. I don’t think he is “controlling” every outcome but I believe creation has a telos and will have a final culmination in the New Creation.

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Not to nit-pick (as certain folks, unnamed, do repeatedly) but I have a keen interest in applying logic and rationality to our beliefs to the extent possible, such as your quote above. It helps when it all “makes sense”, even though much remains mysterious. So my attempt here is to reconcile your beliefs (and formulate my owns) that a) God intervened in biological evolution but not b) in human history. You (and I) believe that the foundation of our existence began with God. A universe created by Him 13.8 Bya, only H and He, with the laws of physics we know today. Then natural processes began that very slowly allowed for heavier elements through the formation and explosion of supernovae. These atoms populated our galaxy and ~4.5 Bya our solar system was formed. The molecules of life formed by natural chemical bonds, but God’s initiative was necessary to set cellular life in motion (science has yet to find a natural ‘godless’ way). Then for ~3 B years we had single cell organisms that naturally began to evolve such as to acquire the organelles necessary to manufacture proteins (DNA), pass genetic code (DNA/RNA and ribosomes), manufacture energy (mitochondria and plastids) and form 3-dimensional membranes for stability and permeability of products necessary, and excretion of those not.

So He still exists, but has chosen not to intervene in human history. We are what our biological organization is…no more and no less. Many questions are thus raised, e.g. why do we pray if He has chosen to not intervene in “human history” as you say. After all, we (may have) free will to make choices independent of what others would consider right or wrong. Or even what we think God tells us is sinful.

Your thoughts usually are consistent and logical to me, so I beseech your patience and further explanation.

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I actually meant the reverse. That God intervenes/intervened in human history not human biological evolution. (If by intervention we mean altering the “natural” course of things. I think God can be actively involved in creation, shepherding natural processes in some way we can’t fully explain without requiring supernatural interventions for evolution or any other natural process to proceed as we observe.) God clearly has altered the course of human history by his self-revelation, not to mention the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Pentecost. God initiating a relationship with humans is a historical intervention not a biological intervention. So I was trying to communicate that I don’t think God creating us in his image was God tinkering with biological evolution or imparting a soul. I think it was God calling humanity to bear his image via revelation and relationship, a history intervention, not a biological intervention.

It might though. All natural processes are God’s processes, so I don’t see how finding a natural mechanism for the origin of life would be problematic. It’s not like the lack of a natural explanation “proves” God.

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So your practical alternative is what???

Teaching them to look forward to a future of deathless zombies rising out of graves?

Or is it a future oblivion of non-existence because the spiritual things do not exist?

I very much beg to differ… the teaching of a resurrection to a spiritual body IS the most practical. Because people should look forward to a continuation with an eternal relationship with God in a readiness to let go of our physical/natural life on the earth. Can you explain your notion that these alternatives are “more practical?”

Or is your practical solution to get them to shut down their brain and not to think about things which you have magnanimously decided is a waste of their time?

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But that was not my suggestion either. He didn’t “tinker”, but rather set a process in place such that what we now see and know is possible…mutation>selection>survival> heritability. These seem statistically improbable without His calculus implementing the processes in the first place. And of course I discount the Genesis message as clearly a metaphorical and/or figurative description of exactly His process that we see today: the evolutionary tree of life, from single cells, to plants, to animals during the Cambrian explosion and now us.

No, of course not. But when we are left with a “but for a better explanation, we have no idea” issue, it seems reasonable to assign another cause. If it couldn’t have occurred naturally, then divine guidance feels like a better explanation.

That is my point. God set this all in motion, and thus everything that happens can be attributed to His creation 13.8 Bya. But since then, it appears that “ordinary” science can explain almost all that we see. It does not require His continued intervention. And our free will tells us that it is all up to us now.

I would characterize those events as important, and am agreeing with you. But the context of my question about “altering human history” had to do with a more direct intervention, such as answering a prayer, curing a disease, or causing rain to fall, not simply revealing Himself to a crowd. Miracles are another thing, but they seem to be confined to ONLY the era of 30 AD-33 AD and done by Christ’s hand (I am excluding hundreds of alleged miracles that seem less than fully verifiable).

Thanks for re-phrasing my questions to more accurately characterize your beliefs…

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Could you clarify what you mean by intervention because people use this word to mean anything from influence to miracle.

I think science often can explain things I believe God is influencing because I believe God influences and interacts with creation. Science does not have the tools to study how God influences and interacts with creation so it is just a faith claim that cannot be proven. A lot of times people use intervention to mean a supernatural, miraculous, not possible “naturally” kind of event. I am not convinced that we are required to posit these kinds of interventions in evolutionary history. It seems the natural explanations work fine. I don’t however believe that because a natural explanation or mechanism exists that means God was hands-off the whole time or was not “involved.” I believe God did and does much more than set nature in motion and passively observe how it all plays out, maybe stepping in with an occasional course correction or nudge at points. I think God is actively involved in all the natural processes in ways we cannot describe or empirically test/prove.

So you discount all signs in the Old Testament? Prophets performed miracles and often the significance of Christ’s miracles was in the relationship to OT signs and miracles. (Like feeding the 5,000 was a picture of manna in the desert, for example) Do you discount all the OT accounts of healings and provision as just stories?

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Ageed, doing it out of anger has already been judged. Judgment is over and doesn’t mean we can’t proceed to proper reaction in my thinking.

I do, as in what did Jesus cast out, where to, and other reasons describing empirical aspects of a spirit not being bound to the body such as love and hate won’t reside together, a spirit of fear sread across the room (sharing, or contagion), or everyone’s sentiment soured when he walked into the room, his meaness rubbed off on me, I was happy this morning. Transitoyr, temporal.

The question is like a dent in a car, remove the dent and the car remains, but where is the dent? Does a mood disappear like the dent, or does it have its own foundation that also persists outside us?

Not so much implying a the non-corporal mindless and compelling entity and possession in the religious sense. That it may be, but I note the temporal and conveyance nature as well as some like vengeance and deceit will reside together but neither welcome a merciful spirit. They don’t all agree or get along.

As to the empirical nature of spirit. I suspect you know the root word is breath, to bring life to something, and seemingly around the time of the Greeks we start to see the definition of spirit as compelling, intent, and motive in legal systems treating motives as separate from words (mind) and actions (body) where the spirit is instead describing an initiator of the two influencing how we think and form our words. The Bible seems silent on describing this initiator except through it fruits that are known and seen. Separate from the mind. The tone of our voice, attitude, and emotions are attributed to the spirit.

I’ve seen many who let their spirit decide how to respond instead of the other way around. Anger won’t show any mercy or kindness.

A counterview is we developed each emotion individually and keep them in our closet where they don’t get along. Casting out may only be the suppression of natural bodily responses?

I mostly work from what’s functionable and of good intent. If I tell myself I don’t want to feel that way and change my attitude, I may misuderstand it’s true nature but if it seems good, acceptable, and resolves the problem, I’ll accept it as is because of the need and I see no ill intent (spirit).

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Has no practical application to their real lives.

As there is no tangible proof of this spiritual body and it does not change or impinge on our percptions of this life it is only of accademic use.

Neither the carrot, (Heaven), nor the stick (Hell) are helpful to every day living. All people need to know is that when they make a mistake to ask for forgivenss and move on instead of dwelling in guilt.

You and I know that it is faith, not works that matters with redemption, but faith without works is dead. So we concentrate on what it means to be a Christian rather than the theological ramifications of redemption.

They need to live this life first. This life is not just a rite of passage to the next. It has value in its own right.

It is not a matter of shutting their brains down. It is applying their brains to practical Christianity instead of sitting in front of a computer and ranting.

Richard

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Simply altering the course of natural events such outcomes are altered. I’m accepting miracles performed by Christ since they are verifiable historically. A prayer deemed as answered would be an example of intervention.

Perhaps, but my premise was to stipulate that He actually created it all 13.8 Bya, and continued intervention and/or influence was not necessary and in fact does not occur. He set everything we need in motion. There is no need for further modification (my stipulation, not necessarily my belief).

Science certainly has the tools to explain the process of evolution. The big problem is to explain the creation and tools. E.g. we have chemical reactions that can look like metabolism, but we can’t explain how or why nucleotides came into being such that we could have genes instruct a molecule to make a protein that serves as an enzyme for that reaction. So our biggest problem is the creation…thus I see the necessity for God to have performed that for us. Nothing else has been necessary.

And to that point, we must rely on our faith, not science. I’m not in any way suggesting that you are wrong, but only that a perfectly created world at the outset no longer requires His intervention. Having said that, I still pray a lot!

I admit that I view them as metaphors and examples to be used figuratively so as to encourage our faith that God began all of this. It is not, and should not be used as a historical reference and certainly not in a scientific context.

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If you don’t mind, let me try to give you a clearer sense without directly addressing each point separately. They’re all related but I feel like I’d be repeating myself a lot otherwise. But let’s start here:

Yes. I think what is missing is some balance. I think hands-on know-how can be grounding for people. But I don’t think we can or should want to return to a state of nature. There can be no return to the garden. But if we recognize how our current state of knowing fits with more ancient ways, more of us might prioritize some things differently and I do think there can be peace in that. Here I’m thinking of “peace” as the equanimity that comes from understanding enough to recognize our limits in that regard.

In the garden we, like all creatures experienced knowledge at the point of action in the lived world. Knowledge was implicit in how we responded to what the world presented to us. We didn’t step out of the present moment to consider representational maps of the world. We couldn’t consider hypothetical courses of action we might take until we had visual and verbal ways to represent the knowledge we had acquired, thus making it explicit. In this way we took the fruit of knowledge as our own, no longer experiencing it only in the moment as the world called it forth as all other creatures still do.

Now that we so often move through the world navigating by way of all those explicit-knowledge maps and models, what has become of the older form of knowing which manifests directly in response to the world? I think it’s still there and can be tapped in creative activities, reflection and in moments of awe. It isn’t that this older form could or should replace our exercise of conscious deliberation. But like the elephant in Haidt’s analogy for how morality works, I think we are foolish if we think meaning and purpose are things we get to arbitrarily decide on. The sacred is something we feel viscerally. A cerebral logos doesn’t work for me.

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Heymike3, sorry it’s taken me a while to get back to this, but I wanted to address @MarkD 's concern about your use of his text.
Altering a quoted text as you have done can be legitimate for the purposes of demonstration, but there are standard conventions that should be followed. Otherwise, it really is plagiarism. Here are some tools you should use for your purposes above:

Indicating Changes in Quotations

Quoting Only a Portion of the Whole

Use ellipsis points (. . .) to indicate an omission within a quotation–but not at the beginning or end unless it’s not obvious that you’re quoting only a portion of the whole.

Adding Clarification, Comment, or Correction

Within quotations, use square brackets (not parentheses) to add your own clarification, comment, or correction.

Use [sic] (meaning “so” or “thus”) to indicate that a mistake is in the source you’re quoting and is not your own.

These came from: Human Verification

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Thank you for your concern. I mean that.

In the future, I’ll be more careful. In this case, I could have been more clear with what I was doing. I did not pretend that it was my text obviously, but I assumed Mark would make the reference to my previous comment to him in the thread, the comment about how a philosopher like Heidegger can unwittingly (or not) hide the truth of their text by using plural pronouns.

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For the first question, discovering that my views on origins (evolutionary creation) were wrong would not fundamentally change my views on God and morality. Theologically, I think that any scientific account of origins is acceptable for a Christian as long as God is somehow involved in the process. That being said, my understanding of creation as being more of a continuous, unfolding process (cosmogenesis as opposed to cosmogony) has significantly informed my understanding of eschatology and the destiny of humanity and the universe. Thus, for example, if it did turn out that young earth creationism or progressive creationism were the way to go, my core theology would not be affected, but I might need to re-think how that core theology would be played out in how we understand the material creation.

For the second question, I was a (1) until my High school years, then I oscillated for a few years between (3) and (4) before stabilizing at (4) after starting graduate school. Studying archaeology and then geology and paleontology had a significant effect on this transition, so did becoming a planetary geologist. I have no philosophical objections to God creating life or humanity in a way that science cannot explain but so far we have been able to explain many things that were originally thought impossible to explain with science. I would not be surprised, for example, if we discovered a scientific way to explain the origin of life or the origin of consciousness within the brain. I have also come to the understanding that God is always involved whether or not we can explain it. God may have created life in a way that we can explain through geochemistry or he may have created it in a way that science cannot or may never be able to explain. What matters is that he did it. That concludes my first post on this forum.

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Thanks for understanding my intent.

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Welcome to the forum, at @CSTR . We have not had a planetary geologist around here and were in dire need! Seriously, Joel Duff on the Natural Historian has posted some fascinating stuff on Martian geology, so that is a fascinating field.

I would agree with you on your positions, though would probably have more trouble adjusting my view of God if young earth creationism were the case in fact.

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Mark, thanks for putting thoughtful response together that addresses my various questions, your willingness to act as translator. Again, I think it’s time for that picnic in our yard. So much easier to sit with friends and talk and eat and enjoy the day. I’m afraid my continuing string of questions here will simply become tiresome.

So, I’ll respond with a picture from our vacation last summer from our visit to the Presque Isle River.

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It exemplifies, what I understand you mean by implicit knowledge. My family and I were on a large, flat rock that the river flows around (falls in front and back and Lake Superior a 2 minute stroll through the woods from this seat) eating lunch. Sitting down/planting myself, doing a normal, necessary task like eating, while feeling the warm stone, at times overwhelmed by the water, noise of the water, getting my feet, shoes, socks and jeans wet in the river and slogging around that way until they dry, stopping and being there. It never lasts long enough. I bring home rocks and bark and driftwood, but they are no substitute.

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Welcome to the forum.

Your comment brought to mind the relationship of science (methodological naturalism) to miraculous healings today. Craig Keener has done an excellent work of researching accounts that can be medically documented. For me, it’s indisputable that miraculous healings have occurred, but how that is affected is a real question. I tend to think it begins with a virtual particle appearing out of nowhere with the exact force and timing needed.

It’s also interesting how you tie the question of origins to eschatology. I hadn’t considered that before. But I’m also not clear on how you are using cosmogenesis and cosmogony:

Would you please elaborate a little more on this?