That goes a good way toward meeting one of my objections. Personally I would allow that God too had no ex nihilo beginning. But neither was He whole and complete from the beginning.
In Genesis 1:2-4 there might be and it’s not exhaustively ruled out. The second creation story where God tried to make Adam a helper and realizes none of these he created works so he has to make Eve, not so much.
We are influenced by much later Greek thought and the Omni-attributes of what God must be like. You can argue God moved the author to include it for sure and that maybe true, but from the perspective of whoever wrote Genesis, I don’t think that is what they meant. Genesis 1 is a very advanced theology compared to the creation narratives around it. It is a solid move in the right direction but it’s not quite there yet in terms of modern thought.
The idea is of a very powerful God who merely commands and things are done. It’s absolutely a move in this direction. But then of course, Gen 2-9 kind of undoes a lot of what 1 does.
Vinnie
That’s actually all over the place in Genesis 2-9.
Moderns think God was being rhetorical or facilitating discussion when he asked Adam hiding in the trees where he was. Or when Adam named all the animas and God realized no suitable helper could be found. When he repented and lamented of making humans. When he changed his tactics and agreed to never destroy all of humanity again with a flood. The God of the first creation story is more in line with modern thought and probably doesn’t learn. The God in the second story and by the other author does change and evolve. But modern thought fails to accept this type of thinking so exegesis turns to eisegesis.
I think you would truly appreciate Karen Armstrong’s interpretation of Genesis (In the Beginning). It had me looking at all of Genesis in a very different light.
Her contention is right from the outset Genesis tells us moderns it will give us no decisive answers to our predicament. Did God create matter ex nihilo or shape the pre-existing void? We can’t know. Did Adam bring all evil? But why was there a crafty snake tempting then then? We are all like Jacob who wrestled with God all night. When he asked God his name he didn’t get an answer. Only a blessing. God also seems to just pick who he wants without warrant. Cain and Abel, Noah to an extent and others. Genesis tells us to wrestle in the face of uncertainty and a frightening world. But it doesn’t answer most of the questions moderns think it does.
I got a copy from my local library. Enjoyed it so much I ordered a cheap, used copy to put on the shelf.
Vinnie
Well, that’s good to hear. But you’re a “rare bird” and an exception to my stereotype, which is a good thing: it forces me to revise my stereotype: Now I know that not all ex-Christian atheists have a beef.
Many do with superglue or duct tape. The reconciliation of religious beliefs and science is a testament to human ingenuity.
??? How old are you and where do you live? I’m 72, retired, and live in East Los Angeles; but I’ve lived in several places (Oklahoma, Nevada, and California), and I’ve done a fair bit of traveling round the world: I’ve met folks who would die on molehills to defend them, folks who would only die defending one or two mountains; and folks who are unwilling to suffer any discomfort in the defense of a belief and fancy themselves “good natured” and “easy to get along with”.
Challenging beliefs is as challenging and dangerous as herding cats: Martyrologies are filled with tales of those who’ve tried to do either.
I’ve been dinged by moderators in what I believe is the most free-thinking, libertarian forum in the universe for saying that Jehovah’s Witnesses aren’t Christians, and banned from a reputable physics forum for merely announcing, before asking a question, that I’m an Antirelativist and that my question was about what mainstream science says Einstein’s theory of special relativity says about a hypothetical thought experiment. As open to discussion of odd or downright heretical Christian views as Biologos is, declaring yourself to be a divinely-appointed Prophet of God and the King James Version the only divinely-inspired translation of the Bible (excluding the Apocrypha, of course) can get you an invitation to leave and find a soap-box to preach from; elsewhere, and starting an antirelativistic thread will promptly get your thread moved into the darkness of Private Messages before any biologos forum-members can scream and rouse a lynch mob.
Sane thoughts, IMO. But “good luck” trying to ride those horses to the end of a “belief trail”.
Now you are being rather coy here. I answered your question. No more and no less. You asked for an example of a feature essential to our humanity which has no genetic basis. Not all information is transmitted to the next generation is via DNA. Some things are transmitted via human communication. There is nothing of science transmitted in our DNA, nothing of chess, math, or football, or billions of other things which are part of the experience of being human. These things are not nothing. To acknowledge that we have evolutionary adaptations to the use of language over the last 200,000 to 300,000 years or more, doesn’t change this fact in the slightest.
And nothing which you said is relevant to what I said.
Incorrect, I am not treating them at all. This is what YOU are suddenly talking about which has no connection with the answers I was giving to your previous questions.
And in the process you are employing premises which you haven’t bother to mention or explain, if you are even aware of them.
Much of our emotional functionality can be demonstrated to be a product of evolution by finding similar behavior in animals. Whether these are entirely the same as human greed, jealously, anger, hate, etc… let alone entirely independent of the language aspects of our thinking is another matter which I certainly do not think has been established and is a suggestion I would be very skeptical about.
Who believes in “god-directed evolution?” I haven’t used such words and I would not use them, so perhaps you need to explain what you think they mean.
Question following some logical connections of your own is not the same as asking for explanation of what I meant in the answers to your original question. If you want to use the Socratic method of leading me down the primrose path of your thinking then you are going to have to make a little more effort to expose the premises of your thinking. Because I am not just going to blindly follow along with whatever you say.
First I think you need to set aside your use of the word “intense” which I don’t think equates to your previous use of “any genetic basis” for these emotions. I am not willing to make the same equivocations and other leaps of thinking that you have made in your so called “following the logical implications.”
Hard to say. I am not sure that these emotional functionalities are independent of others like those for love and empathy which may play a role in restraining evil, so it seems plausible that without whatever emotional functionality is involved that evil might actually be greater. I frankly think you have made a dive into deep waters where I have good reason to doubt if you know what you are talking about at all.
Okay let me summarize my understanding of Christianity when combined with Theistic Evolution, and then you can tell me what you agree or disagree with?
- God created humans by somehow guiding evolution so that we eventually appeared. This is in contrast to the goal-less evolution taught in most biology classes.
- Both our physical bodies and our minds, and in particular human nature, are all the product of evolution. By human nature, I mean the general psychological characteristics, feelings, and behavioral traits of humankind, which are shared by all humans. This includes things like empathy, love, compassion, but also things like hate, jealousy, anger etc. It is the latter behaviors that motivate much of the evil that humans do. Without them, humans would have little or no desire to commit evil
- We have the free-will to choose to commit or refrain from sin in particular situations, but it is impossible for any person to refrain from sinning over a normal lifespan because the negative aspects of our god-given human nature are too strong to resist indefinitely. Here I’m specifically thinking of Romans 3:23, “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.
- Because we sin, god judges us as deserving punishment (eternal damnation?) but he created a way by which some (not all?) can escape this punishment. I say ‘some’ here because if you lived and died worshiping the Aztec gods before Christianity was brought to America then you had little or no hope of redemption.
Its like god set us up to fail and then judges us worthy of punishment when we do
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I personally have no reason to believe God guided evolution. I don’t think most here believe that either.
Adam and Eve were never immortal. They had sustained immortality through the tree of life. If they were already inherently immortal there would be no reason for a tree of life to exist there. They were cut off from it because they sinned. They only had a few rules and one of them was don’t touch this tree of good and bad.
Adam and Eve was not different from us than Moses, Abraham, or you and me. Adam was already able to make a personal choice. Just like us. He chose to sin just like we do.
Nothing about humanity is inherently good or evil. We have emotions and free will and can choose what we want.
Theistic evolution is a statement that simply means I’m a religious person who believes in the theory of evolution. The individual religious beliefs of that person can range greatly.
Affirming that conscious belief in the historical Jesus is the only way to the father in an absolutely universal sense sounds like fundamentalism to me. Catholics believe in purgatory and not all of us believe that the moment you die you face a single judgment for all eternity and go immediately to hell or heaven.
Even if it is true that Jesus is the only way, which most of us affirm, you can be saved by Jesus without knowing him—or at least “historical facts” about him. ‘A rose by any other name smells just as sweet.’ CS Lewis: “We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him.”
Too many conservatives read GJohn as if everything is a timeless universal mandate. Much of it appears that way but it all has an appropriate setting and historical context as well. We need to temper this universal temptation by realizing John is sometimes hyperbolically reframing Jesus simply to reinforce his Christian community’s beliefs in a hostile environment as they were ousted from the synagogue and in bitter opposition with Jews post-Temple destruction. This is a persecuted community and it is being assured of the correctness of their beliefs. The prophetic Spirit is assuring them they got it right. Jesus is the way. Their adversaries, those who persecute and reject them get it wrong in failing to accept Jesus. Christians are the ones to inherit the promises made to Israel. The harsher the opposition the stronger the affirmation of the community’s beliefs. Jesus is the new dispensation, a new Genesis has begun. This is the backdrop for the Gospel of John, not Jesus existing in 2021 timelessly telling all people if you don’t believe in the facts about me in the Bible you go to hell.
Everyone my be judged based on what they know not on whether or not they were born with a good hand in the luck of life. Most Christians make exceptions for babies and those who never heard the Gospel including Abraham, Moses, et al. But once we do this we cannot claim that conscious faith in the historical Jesus is a requirement for salvation. If we think that babies or people who have never heard of Jesus could possibly be saved then we cannot exhaustively claim that conscious belief and acceptance in Jesus’ historical revelation and mission, in the incarnation of God, is a necessary requirement for salvation. It might be the best road to salvation but it’s not the only road. There may be other roads and ways of knowing the transforming and risen Jesus, in this life or the next. It’s a very simple logical proposition. If p was absolutely required for q then in no way could babies or Moses be saved. You could not make it to q without p. As C. Stephen Evan’s wrote,
“Can we maintain that awareness of God’s historical incarnation is necessary for salvation and also hold that at least some of those who lack such historical knowledge are saved? Logically, one cannot hold that p is necessary for q, and also hold that q can be achieved without p. One must clear-headedly hold on to this logical truth and not allow sentiment to fuzzy up our thinking on such matters.” The Historical Christ & The Jesus of Faith, p 107
In other words, we can admit Jesus is the only way to God and also believe that one does not have to accept Christian doctrine in order to be saved. Salvation is not about giving your intellectual assent to something. We aren’t that smart that God cares about our IQ. The Gospel doesn’t need or require our approval. It is not one of the many doors in life but the hinge of all doors. Accepting the transforming and risen Jesus in your heart does not require giving intellectual assent to the verisimilitude of a book.
We are not all fundamentalists or hardcore Calvinists. In fact, I probably have the same intellectual disdain for these philosophies as you do. God is love, not an unfair and primitive bully and the incarnation fully justifies this statement. The historical Jesus was a demonstration of God’s love. It was good news.
Vinnie
God created living things not as a watchmaker designer but as a shepherd providing the required circumstances and making an occasional nudge in the direction He wanted like an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs. It was not to control the process or design the result but to encourage the development of things He wanted such as greater cooperation, greater intelligence, and ultimately the use of language.
The body and brain which are self-organizing processes of life in the medium of organic chemistry are a product of evolution, but evolution does not well describe the development of the mind which is a self-organizing process of life in the medium of human language. One big difference for example is the inheritance of acquired characteristics – with the mind we can pass on what we learn in our own lifetime. This tends to make the development of the mind a thousand times (at least) faster than biological evolution.
I would talk to an evolutionary psychologist like Jordan Peterson on this topic. This is too recent a development in scientific inquiry to jump to any conclusions too quickly.
I think this is a poor description of what is happening except when the human mind fails to be in control and person is dominated by instincts like an animal. More often evil is a product of bad habits of thinking, where emotions play very little role in what they do.
Free will is not absolute, universal, or indestructible and plays more of a role in choosing our habits rather than controlling every thing we do. Those habits can increase our free will and the awareness on which free will depends or they can enslave us to thinking or behaviors which are self-destructive.
People refrain from all kinds of self-destructive habits but we do have the deck stacked against us with the examples of others so it is practically impossible to avoid them all. But we have no nature to do evil given to us either by God or anything else. However, by the time we learn to speak, it is inevitable that we have adopted some of the self-destructive habits of other people by imitation. And it is like a degenerative disease dragging us down into less freedom and greater depravity eventually.
Sin is self-destructive and will consume everything of value and goodness within us eventually if not stopped. God seeks to help us overcome these self-destructive habits. The consequences of our actions can never be escaped, but we can cooperate with God in the removal of these self-destructive habits.
To be sure some have been surrounded by a greater prevalence of self-destructive habits in their society including the misuse of religion. But no this does not make it impossible for God to reach out to some people in such circumstances – more difficult but not impossible. And frankly, we see a lot of misuse of religion in Christianity also.
Incorrect. We see the ultimate in our self-destructive habits when we kill those sent to help us. That is what put Jesus Himself on the cross.
We are certainly worthy of suffering the logical consequences of our own choices. And God will sometimes abandon people to those consequences when there is no hope for them to change, or He will even push their buttons to manipulate them in bringing about events for the greater good of mankind.
In conclusion, I would agree that evolution does require some changes in our understanding of the Bible and Christianity. But it has obviously not been so difficult that the majority of Christians have not been able to do so. And some of these changes are changes back to what the Bible already said and away from distortions of philosophy absorbed by Christianity along the way. For example the watchmaker conception comes from Deism and the Biblical conception of God has always been that of a shepherd. And then there are the distortions of Neoplatonism and the Gnostics with their dualism and salvation by knowledge (sound doctrine) which I think must be discarded also.
Is that not what theistic evolution is? God guiding evolution?
Could you give me your comments on my immediately preceding post where I summarize my understanding of christianity? Was there death before the Fall? - #57 by Anthony
You made some good points which I never considered before, especially John 14:6 that it doesn’t necessary mean that salvation is only possible by knowing about Christ. However what exactly is required for Salvation then? How could an Aztec worshipping pagan gods achieve it?
If it was true that non-Christians have the same opportunity for salvation than Christians, then doesn’t it undermine the need for missionary work? In fact if a non-believer rejected Christianity after being told about it for the first time, his salvation might be actually jeopardized? It may be better to be ignorant than to hear the truth and reject it?
I have thought about dying infants before, but the scriptures aren’t clear that they will automatically go to heaven. Also if this were really true, then the opposition to abortion doesn’t make sense because you will be removing the baby’s guaranteed ticket to salvation. Some might say they are trying to prevent mothers from committing murder, but often their focus is more on the unborn losing its life (this shouldn’t bother Christians who believe these babies go straight to heaven, but it does?).
Theistic evolution is then same exact evolution as what atheists, Buddhists, muslims and ect… believes. The term theistic is not designating a special version or subcategory of evolution but it’s highlighting the false contention created by literalist fundamentalist and atheists who believes science and faith are at ends with one another.
So why the need for the word ‘theistic’ in front evolution? The type of evolution you believe is true is no different from that taught in biology classes? Not so?
I have already answered it a few times pretty clearly. I’m not sure how you got misinformed understandings so engrained. Maybe you need to look into deconstructing your young earth creationism/ intelligent design and understand how ambiguous the term theistic evolution / evolutionary creationism is.
Many of the people in here don’t even believe in Adam and Eve as anything more than literary devices for humankind and the only truth you can get out of it is highly symbolic and metaphorical. Some believe other things.
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This is a quote from Wikipedia:
Francis Collins describes theistic evolution as the position that "evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God and characterizes it as accepting “that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God”. It is this last part which distinguishes it from evolution taught in science classes which has nothing guiding it. Is this not what you mean in which case we actually both agree?
I’m very well aware that many Christians take a non-literal view of Genesis, and that many accept evolution while rejecting the anti-science views of creationists. What confuses me is when these Christians (who say they accept evolution) also make claims that to me at least seem inconsistent with science. An example is the Doctrine of Original Sin (which I realize you reject). I think I should actually create a new post with the title “Are the doctrines of Original Sin / The Fall consistent with Evolution?” which is really what I wanted to debate
But even the views of Christians such as yourself who reject any literal interpretation of Genesis confuse me, because it implies that god through evolution, set us up to fail and then he judges us deserving of punishment when we do (see Was there death before the Fall? - #57 by Anthony)
(Do you perhaps mean “the former”? “The latter” appears to be referring to “the anti-science views of creationists.”)
Thanks for pointing that out. I meant some Christians who say they accept evolution still make claims that are inconsistent with evolution e.g. the doctrines of Original Sin and The Fall
Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I’m still busy writing a response
So you’re saying that there was an alteration of the relationship between god and humans and that this is the reason why there is so much suffering and evil in this world? Can you expand on this? In particular:
- How are humans different before and after this change?
- What caused this alteration in the relationship?
- What about humans who had no interaction with Adam & Eve or their descendants until modern times? For example, the Sentinelese are an tribe who have been living on one of the Andaman Islands for at least the last 55000 years and have virtually no contact with the rest of the world. How were they affected by this change in relationship you speak of? Or was this relationship always broken?
You’d make a great detective or lawyer Anthony.