Hi again Peter. Sorry not to get back to you sooner but the holidays do take up a chunk of ones attention. I’m glad you find me comfortable to converse with. It is definitely not something I take for granted. There are many here I feel close to but everyone is different and many Christians in my experience react as if I carried a contagion they would prefer to avoid. But I’ve learned much here from my friends and reasonable believers who do not require complete agreement of beliefs in order to share a conversation. I’m glad you are one of them.
One thing I’ve learned is that everyone has faith in something but not everyone knows what it is they trust on faith. Even those who believe most in material determinism act on that when their direct knowledge can take them no further. But what a meager alternative that would be. I was never in that camp because science is not the primary basis for my beliefs. As a humanities guy I pay attention to how conversations and what I read affects me and I do trust that. I’ve always placed value on reflection and would always prefer to make room for that first rather than brainstorming possible solutions/answers. I think that our existence is largely relational between what is narrowly ours and that which is greater which includes us. So while for years I saw no use for “God” I nonetheless valued leaving space for insight and inspiration from what is more than my own deliberative thoughts. “God” makes a good fit.
When I wrote these questions I really though origins were beside the point but I have to confess that considerations involving the range of options regarding cosmic and human origins and the mind/body problem played a big role in my coming to recognize that God at least as a way of thinking about the greater entity of which we are a part was very satisfying. Admittedly I don’t have the explicit guidance that a traditional religion could provide but having made it seven decades without one, I don’t miss it. Though I do sometimes think wistfully about what that might be like as a source of holy envy. But then I remember all the ways that believers get stuck in literalisms and I realize it is no panacea. But I have no panacea either, that’s part of our common human condition.
I’m sorry about describing the Christian conception of God as an “idol fashioned in human form”. Literalism is a potential trap for all of us of whatever persuasion and, as with faith, we don’t always recognize when we’ve gone down that path. Maybe we can give one another gentle hints in a less offensive manner. I do try but it requires empathy and code switching to avoid stepping in it and I err plenty.
I hope you’re having good conversations here. I certainly have but not as much since returning from a self imposed exile to preserve my peace of mind.
Admittedly it is not easy to explain but I no longer see any impediment to believing intentionality could arise before brains. Indeed that does seem to be what has happened. I’m now content to call that God though my conception of God would not be sufficient to keep together any Christian creed.
I agree with Richard on this…Christ did not ascend into heaven with a spiritual body. The angels even said to the disciples after he disappeared from view “this SAME Jesus…”
The Bible talks about earthly and heavenly bodies…not physical and spiritual ones (when discussing the resurrection and ascension)
Far too often Christians decide that a sinless heavenly body must be a spiritual one. The fact is, salvation is a process of Restoration. God is restoring that which was corrupted by sin back to its former glory. Adam and Eve were not spirits! Evolutionary influences in Christianity influence crazy beliefs partially because they cannot accept that Adam and Eve were real people and that they were perfect. It goes against the evolutionary model and so that stuffs non-biblical nonsense into what should be sound theology .
I see no agreement whatsoever. Richard is saying something entirely different – that Christianity must be entirely about living our physical life and speaking of anything spiritual or non-physical serves no purpose.
1 Corinthians 15
Certainly I do not. Jesus was born and died without sin in a natural physical body. But according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 all are resurrected bodily to an imperishable spiritual body not a perishable natural/physical body.
oh how it pains me to have to explain simple things to people who should know better…
1 Corinthians 15…
The Resurrection Body
35But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” 36You fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. 37And what you sow is not the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or something else. 38But God gives it a body as He has designed, and to each kind of seed He gives its own body.
39Not all flesh is the same: Men have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another, and fish another. 40There are also heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. But the splendor of the heavenly bodies is of one degree, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is of another. 41The sun has one degree of splendor, the moon another, and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.
42So will it be with the resurrection of the dead: What is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable. 43It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. 44It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. 45So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being;”e the last Adam a life-giving spirit.
The point of the passage is actually found in Verse 38…you clearly missed it.
But God gives it a body as He has designed, and to each kind of seed He gives its own body.
As i have already explained, which you ignore without actually considering the SCIENTIFIC facts given you like scientific its time you maintained consistency there…
1 Doubting Thomas…unless i see the wounds and put my finger in his side, i will not believe he is resurrected
Christ appears unrecognisable to his followers early on the Sunday morning…that because he was resurrected with a heavenly physical body (not because he was apparently spirit).
Anyone who claims Christ rose with a spiritual body has some significant scientific issues to address…1 Mary tried to cling to him on the Sunday morning (christ said don’t touch me I have not yet ascended to my father. 2. Christ says to Thomas days after his resurrection…put your finger in my side and see the wounds in the palms of my hands!
The disciples walked and ate with Christ for 6 weeks after the resurrection and then watched him ascend bodily into the sky and be hidden by cloud
One cannot simply read a single source and take doctrine from that in the Bible. One must learn to ensure consistency in belief across the entire bible to ensure accurate theology and doctrine.
As i have said before, Salvation is part of the Restoration of that which was corrupted by sin. It is not an evolutionary fix nor enlightenment for a more evolved being that was originally incapable of understanding…a creator doesnt say to a dumb brainless idiot “don’t do that or else!” He says that to an intelligent being capable of following directions. Just because Eve then Adam failed to follow directions and disobeyed, that has nothing to do with intelligence. They were clearly given a choice, and they did not choose wisely. Even extremely intelligent individuals today make poor choices on a regular basis…so there’s that.
God is restoring everything back to its original design (as 1 Corinthians 15 clearly states)…its very specifically fixing that which Satan ruined when he convinced Eve then Adam to disobey.
Now i know you are going to claim verse 43, however, in doing that you would naturally dig a hole for yourself because i would immediately challenge that 1 Corinthians verse 42 is quoting Genesis Chapter 2:7 (which you don’t take literally and yet here is Paul doing exactly that)
> 7Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.d
So now you have a problem…if you read 1 Corinthians 15 literally, you must accept that Paul cites a literal creation of “man” in Genesis 2:7!
Now before you pull out the statement, “oh but there are two creations”…note that the term “man” (or “the man”) is used to denote creation in Genesis 1 and 2. Its very clearly the SAME MAN!
Genesis 2 is clearly an expansion of Chapter 1…even a plain reading of language makes that very obvious. Its only by twisting the language and playing games with genre that people manage to corrupt the obvious meaning there. Also, the “YEC is a false Modern interpretation” argument is nonsense…its the modern interpretation that is the evolutionary one…not the YEC one. YEC predates the evolutionary by thousands of years (if one is to read 2 Peter for example).
Next, God deciding to fix His original stuff up by instead raising only spirits…how do you expect that fixes anything? Lucifer was an angel (ie a spirit) before he was cast out of heaven. So spirit doesnt make a rats ass of difference to the problem of cleansing the world of evil. If God only cleanses the physical, what then of Satan and all his evil angels who are clearly spirits? Clearly, the interpretation that we are raised as spirits doesnt fit with any of the known biblical examples of resurrection or ascension
Enoch - walked right into heaven (he did not die)
Elijah - taken to heaven in a chariot (he did not die)
Moses - died and was raised again with Satan arguing with the Lord over his body. If he was raised a spirit, who gives a crap about Moses body…why the argument?
Christ - raised, not recognised, and yet very much physical for 6 weeks after his resurrection
Christ - ascended in a physical body into the sky being hidden by a cloud.
Angels - tell the disciples “this same Jesus will return in the same manner you saw Him go up into heaven”
Second Adam - who is the second Adam? Is it not Christ? So why the idea that the original Adam is capable of becoming a life giving spirit? No created being is capable of giving life…only God can do that. Christ, part of the triune God, being both fully God and Fully human (spirit and body) fulfills that statement! Paul is not talking about Adam (from the Garden of Eden) in 1 Corinthians 15:45. He is talking about Christ!
You said the Bible doesn’t talk about physical and spiritual bodies.
But the plain fact is that it does just that in 1 Corinthians 15. Your denial of this according to some “explanation” means you are rewriting the Bible to your own taste. I am not interested.
That contradicts Paul, unless you’re using the common understanding of “spiritual” rather than the biblical one where spiritual does not exclude physical.
Paul talks about “physical and spiritual” bodies when discussing the resurrection.
Ah – you’re buying into the modern false dichotomy that spiritual and physical are exclusive categories. Adam and Eve were mortals but given their ability to walk with God in the Garden they almost certainly had “spiritual bodies”. That term doesn’t mean “non-physical”, it means completely in tune with their spirits. It would sound odd, but we could flip the term and say that they had “earthly spirits”, i.e. spirits totally in tune with their bodies.
Nope – the idea that Adam and Eve were not historical individuals shows up in the church over a millennium and a half before anything resembling evolutionary theory came along. The idea that they are literary exemplars of the whole human race goes back to pre-Nicea.
You’re ignoring v. 44.
So? More than once He also walked right through a crowd who somehow couldn’t grasp Him even though He was right there.
Besides which, when you “know” that someone is dead, why would you recognize him?
Nope. The emergence of YEC can be traced directly to the rise of scientific materialism and its influence in the church – that is where the idea that if something is to be true then it has to be scientifically and historically correct comes from; it doesn’t come from scripture. Only someone with scientific materialism as at least part of their worldview would demand that God had to force ancient writers to conform to a historically very recent worldview.
“Fits with science” is not part of the biblical view of truth – that is a notion not supported at all by any of the scriptures, not found anywhere in fact until it starts to show up a little around the seventeenth century.
Both are because both rely on the notion that truth has to be scientifically correct. The very fact that you look for scientific facts in the scriptures indicated a biblical worldview is not being used.
Yet YEC is the greater offender because it demands that God had to conform to the expectations of a worldview that wouldn’t even exist for several thousand years more; ToE makes no demands of God at all. In this ToE advocates are at least honest.
You’re using a modern dichotomy between physical and spiritual that is not how it’s viewed in the Bible. Since I’ve been delving into second-Temple Judaism lately, I’ll use an example that they recognized: angels are spiritual beings by nature, yet just about every time the Angel of the Lord shows up the manifestation is physical; angels walk on ground, eat food, carry swords, and other things that “mere” physical beings do, yet the Angel remains by nature a spiritual being.
Indeed the whole unique thing about humans may just be that we are by nature both spiritual beings and physical beings, the “bridge” so to speak between a world only spiritual by nature and one only physical by nature.
Nor, I think, is anyone suggesting that we are raised as “only” spirits.
Which is why some have argued that the Incarnation was ‘inevitable’, that for human destiny to be fulfilled God had to become one of us even if there had been no sin.
Harsh, but true.
??
These are your words:
"The Bible talks about earthly and heavenly bodies…not physical and spiritual ones "
To elide the intervening phrase, this reduces to “The Bible doesn’t talk about physical and spiritual bodies”.
Th trouble is that we too easily fall into using the modern dichotomy where spirit and body are utterly different, so we miss the fact that the scriptures can call something “spiritual” without excluding physicality. This false dichotomy starts distorting our theology clear back in Genesis any time someone says that it was a physical death, not a spiritual death; in the view of the writer there and of St. Paul that is a nonsense assertion because spiritual death inherently results in physical death – not immediately, but eventually. It was understood by everyone in the ancient near east that a dead spirit led to a dead body, and that included the Hebrews. To them, that Christ’s physical death and subsequent resurrection meant repair for our spirits, not just our bodies, would have been a no-brainer; for them obviously if you want to fix bodies you have to fix the spirits that belong with them – and the reverse; to fix spirits you have to fix the bodies they will reside in/with. That’s why the Incarnation made sense in the East especially; to cure human spiritual and physical death of course deity had to take on humanity because only deity could accomplish that “repair” while that repair could only be done by a human.
Reading back through this thread it struck me that what for ancient Israel was a punishment is for us the church the normal situation: we are “in exile”, living in a word that isn’t our home, strangers in a strange land, always in Babylon and never in Israel.
Except that the lesson of Babylon is that no geographical location was necessary for them to be the people of Israel! They could still do that in exile, be that in exile, because all that was essential to be Israel was being loyal to Yahweh. Indeed it would not surprise me if a major purpose of the Exile was to prepare the way that the New Kingdom, the church, would function in this world: in communities gathered around the Word.
If I still led Bible studies, I just might make the theme of one “Welcome to Babylon!”
Hi Mark,
I was in my youth, a Christian who went to Church each Sunday,(Anglican) then (Presbyterian), I read my rice paper KJV from about the age of 12 each night until I fell asleep.
When I was in High School, I believed that evolution was how God created, but I didn’t think too much about the details, so I was not overly aware of any inconsistencies between the Bibles account of origins and my evolutionary belief at that time.
Years passed and I still held to that same belief. When I was working in a university in Sydney, Australia, I still held to evolution as the method God used to create. Then after a long time of not seeing them, some very old friends who were good Salvation Army people came to visit my wife and I, and when they departed they left me with three copies of Creation Magazine.
I read each issue from cover to cover and the lights went on, literally!
It all made sense, I prayed about it and knew for certain in faith that God was moving in my life, that the Bibles account in Genesis of the creation and the flood are written as literal history, i.e.,the creation took place supernaturally over six normal days and the seventh day God rested to give us people a pattern to live by, which we still follow to this day.
I have been blessed by God and I am eternally grateful for His Perfect, Selfless, Gracious and Loving act of giving His Earthly incarnate life on the cross to pay for my sins, unworthy as I am.
I am compelled right now to pray for all on this site and to let you know that a powerful documentary film, where 15 Ph.D. scientists explain evolution’s fatal flaws—in areas claimed to be its greatest strengths! is being offered at present to stream for Free for a period of seven days.
The documentary film, “Evolution’s Achilles Heels” can be accessed through this link:
This film presents very powerful present day scientific evidence that is totally consistent with the Bibles trustworthy historical account of the Creation, the Fall, and the Flood of Noah.
I now fully understand that there never was any evolution, it is a falsified theory that is more of a philosophical belief than anything supported by hard evidence (that supports the myriad of changes required to transform microbes into men through millions upon millions of iterations over ‘deep time’,) that is demonstrated through rigorous operational science.
Right now I know, Jesus Himself in His deity and part of the Holy Trinity with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is holding all of creation in existence by His will and His love for us all.
The misery, pain and suffering that we see all around the world right now is the direct result of mankind’s propensity to sin through our combined possession of the knowledge of good and evil, (that started with Adam and Eve, real people in a real Garden), we ALL fall short of the Glory and Righteousness of our Holy God.
The Bible CAN be trusted just as God can be trusted, He is faithful and True.
He loves us ALL, and does not wish that any one should perish. Hallelujah!
Your brother in Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour,
God bless,
jon
Didn’t watch the whole thing, but what I did see was just the SOSO. Any time somebody talks about “ancient scientists” they don’t know what they are talking about. And some of their objections aren’t even actually related to evolution. This is really more of a YEC is true argument. And that dog don’t hunt.
"Confirmation bias (also confirmatory bias, myside bias, or congeniality bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs.
Biased search for information, biased interpretation of this information, and biased memory recall, have been invoked to explain four specific effects:
attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence)
belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false)
the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series)
illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).
A series of psychological experiments in the 1960s suggested that people are biased toward confirming their existing beliefs. Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another proposal is that people show confirmation bias because they are pragmatically assessing the costs of being wrong, rather than investigating in a neutral, scientific way.
Flawed decisions due to confirmation bias have been found in a wide range of political, organizational, financial and scientific contexts. These biases contribute to overconfidence in personal beliefs and can maintain or strengthen beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. For example, confirmation bias produces systematic errors in scientific research based on inductive reasoning (the gradual accumulation of supportive evidence). Similarly, a police detective may identify a suspect early in an investigation, but then may only seek confirming rather than disconfirming evidence. A medical practitioner may prematurely focus on a particular disorder early in a diagnostic session, and then seek only confirming evidence. In social media, confirmation bias is amplified by the use of filter bubbles, or “algorithmic editing”, which display to individuals only information they are likely to agree with, while excluding opposing views.
I hate to break it to you, but I have the book for this movie in my office. And the problem is that it can leave otherwise reasonable people like yourself thinking that evolution is just a failed scientific theory. As a rule of thumb, any material that leaves you thinking evolution is a failed scientific theory is poorly made material. The actual mountains of evidence for biological evolution have been hidden from your eyes, with YEC gatekeepers don’t ever present to you the actual mountains of evidence for biological evolution. Why is that? I read YEC material for years and had NO idea what went into various scientific theories. Their articles hid or ignored reasonable explanations for the world around us, while trying to present any gaps in our understanding as evidence that we know nothing.
I’d take YEC writer Todd Wood and listen to his advice to you over this poor documentary any day:
I hope this doesn’t turn into a rant, but it might. You have been warned.
Evolution is not a theory in crisis. It is not teetering on the verge of collapse. It has not failed as a scientific explanation. There is evidence for evolution, gobs and gobs of it. It is not just speculation or a faith choice or an assumption or a religion. It is a productive framework for lots of biological research, and it has amazing explanatory power. There is no conspiracy to hide the truth about the failure of evolution. There has really been no failure of evolution as a scientific theory. It works, and it works well.
Talking in the mirror Terry is a common habit of individuals…humans infected by sin regularly attempt to place their own flaws onto others as some kind of self righteous affirmation that they have the way despite knowing that biblical truth is not on their side.
I do not see it that way…you are interpreting that im making said claim…which is false and a misunderstanding of my statements St Roymond.
I note that you avoid quoting my posts with their contextual biblical references…doing that allows you to make responses that appear correct when they are woefully inadequite in theology. Straw plucking others posts here is indicative of a person whos theology is derived from the same habits.
You are consumed by this idea that it was Gods purpose that mankind evolve from a primative entity into a heavenly one. That the Second Coming of Christ is the fulfillment of the Evolutionary process of enlightenment. That is not a Christian belief St Roymond, the bible teaches that sin corrupted creation…defiled it and from that point forward all creation has suffered a reversal in everlasting life. Contrary to your claims, things are not getting better here!
You will not find anywhere in the bible support for the above notion…what you will find with glaring regularity is the revelation that:
Moses records God direct revelation to him that Satan corrupted ALL creation in the literal narrative of Genesis and defiled it with sin when Adam and Eve transgressed the law. Moses does not write this as a convenient story to support his own form of ancient Jewish morality.
The wages of sin were such that mankinds only hope was “the sanctuary” the template for Christs PHYSICAL atonement for His own creation. This theme remains consistent throughout all 66 books of the bible cannon. You cannot find biblical support for the claim we are raise spiritual…Christ was physically raised as is testified in his statement to doubting Thomas (put your hand in my side…)
the second coming of Christ is shortly before the destruction of all that sin has corrupted by fire and brimestone and a new creation (Revelation 21)
that we are saved from the destruction because of Christs atoning sacrifice. Its really interesting that the bible doesnt specifically illuatratre that anything else, will be saved from eternal destruction…only humanity is mentioned. Im wondering how the apparent evolution to enlightenment model you follow explains that nothing else survives the bible tale?
BTW…in all of the long response to my posts, did i see any biblical referencing to support your words? You are good at writing novels ST Roymond, however, your academic habits are not good in that you dont quote from the bible…you make up your own beliefs and then quote those instead.
Dear Matthew,
thanks for your thoughts on the documentary film, “Evolution’s Achilles Heel’s”.
You can rest assured that nothing has been hidden from my eyes, indeed I see the world around me very clearly and thank our Gracious Lord for all that He does for us all now and for eternity.
Of course there never was any evolution, if evolution were a real process, then we would see massive quantities of unquestionable evidence. Perhaps one of the most obvious deficiencies in evolution theory is the extraordinary absence of transitional forms of creatures in the many billions of fossils that have now been unearthed, catalogued and stored around the world.
If evolution was a real process, then we would find trillions upon trillions of transitional forms of creatures as they ascended over ‘deep time’ from the first single celled creatures that could reproduce themselves to the massive diversity of complex life forms that have existed on Earth all the way up to mankind, but WHERE ARE THEY? Nowhere to be found!
What we actually observe in reality is all creatures are becoming LESS fit, i.e., all creatures are DEVOLVING if I can use that word, as they say, the train is going in the wrong direction!
The only mechanism that is truly plausible for evolution, i.e., genetic mutations and Natural Selection are incapable of creating the kind of uphill changes that are absolutely necessary for microbe to man evolution, that is rock solid rigorous science.
Sure, if you have a worldview that believes, hook, line and sinker that evolution is real, then you will disagree and attempt to refute that which in Truth is irrefutable.
The film covers several areas, that are regularly debated on this website.
I would encourage you to watch the film again if you haven’t recently done so at the link in my post above, and also watch the excellent video interview with Geomorphologist Dr Ron Neller a flood expert who finds genuine evidence for a global flood at tinyurl.com/3ste79du
You would do yourself a favour also to watch the interview with Dr Don Batten who provides information that dinosaurs can’t be old at tinyurl.com/bddurba9
and also another excellent interview with Dr Don Batten who provides four sound evidences for a young earth at tinyurl.com/ev72mubu
No apparent, perceived, or claimed evidence in any field of study, including science, history, and chronology, can be valid if it contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture obtained by historical-grammatical interpretation.
So confirmation bias in creationism is a disposition, but also a demand of dogma. Thou shalt hold to any explanation that aligns with a young earth, no matter the evidence.
thats a good point and i do agree with it broadly however, i personally do not believe that there is not evolution per se, there is. Its just that what YEC like myself believe is that no new life forms evolve, only that variations in existing “animal kinds” occur and that this is in response to Gods design and changes He initiated after the fall of mankind and particularly the flood.
I believe that if God in the recent past (after the fall of Adam and Eve) did not actively involve himself in the ability of creation to mutate, then life on earth would have died out as a consequence of sin. So for me, that part of the evolutionary method is necessary but i do not believe in predestination in salvation beyond the notion that he wants all to be saved…for me that extends to the idea that he created with evolution in mind just in case Adam and Eve (or their offspring) sinned
I think part of the problem with Theistic Evolutionism is the notion that God may not actively manipulate his creation despite Christ performing miracles where he did exactly that (ie water into wine, demons into pigs, raising from the dead,walking on water) . Secondly, that Satan cannot physcially interract with Creation or the aftermath of events such as the flood(despite the story of Job).
It seems to me that there is this belief that He (God) is a designer/maker who, once the process was initiated, is unable to prevent what happens next from naturally occuring and that Satan needs permission ever time he wishes to interract with the physcial world. The thing is, we have already invited Satan in…he has our permission and we are not robots. This means that Satan has multiple avenues for interracting with creation, controlling the elements/nature as well as tempting the mind. What individuals here like St Roymond seem to forget is that even their own belief talks of salvation in both physcial and spiritual terms, however, they ignore that Satan also uses those same principles for his own ends and appear to only focus on the spiritual because thats necessary in order to support theistic evolutionary belief.
