I’m intrigued. Why would “metaphysical and miraculous activity” be a third option? (Perhaps I’m misunderstanding here.) I added “did not involve any natural process” because I was trying to INCLUDE the metaphysical and the miraculous as defined from the position I thought Hisword would hold.
Ugh… I missed the use of the word “not”.
Yes, yes. Adding the phrase would be fine:
"Did God give humanity self-awareness by means of Evolution? Or did God endow either human bodies or human minds with awareness… " + “…by some means that did not involve any natural process”?
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Thanks. Actually I’m not talking about humans when it comes to self awareness. My understanding is that in the tree of life there are earlier species that are self aware. Whales for instance are considered self aware and they became fully aquatic 40 million years ago. From an evolutionary creation standpoint why are whales and dolphins aware but not most animals. I’ve seen lists for instance that say dogs fail the test. Would that make them accountable to God? These are important questions in my opinion when deciding how God brought the current complexities of life to be in 2017. When was His image passed onto mankind. How did the process of Image transfer work with 5,000 people (instead of Adam & Eve) if they each one were self aware at different levels of progress in the evolution of their consciousness?
The mysteries of “self-awareness” are far greater than the mere questions of how species evolved.
I can see you will be pretty well occupied with all of it for years to come…
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If [quote=“gbrooks9, post:85, topic:36424”]
The mysteries of “self-awareness” are far greater than the mere questions of how species evolved.
[/quote]
Then how can you be so dogmatic in your support of evolution as the method God used. Evolution does not explain how consciousness appears in life in a reasonable way. Pretty large gap in describing life as we know it.
Because no other explanation makes as much sense or has as much corroboration.
The Great Flood, or even a sequence of Floods, makes zero sense for explaining much simpler things…
How about God did it supernaturally! Problem solved.
Evolution does not explain how consciousness appears in life in a reasonable way.
So what? Many things in life are unknown. I assume consciousness is an active area of research. Besides, consciousness doesn’t fossilize very well. I don’t care very much for the demand, “Explain everything now, otherwise goddidit.”
Otherwise God did it? Why is that proposition so distasteful?
Historically our knowledge gaps have become smaller. That paints a pathetic picture of God, scurrying from his hiding place, trying to find another one.
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That was my response near the beginning of this thread. I don’t know precisely when and I don’t know precisely how God developed comsciousness, but I do believe He is completely responsible for it.
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Do you mean this in the same sense that He is completely responsible for evolution, star/galaxy formation, the Big Bang, etc.? After all, he’s not the god of the gaps but of everything.
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Yes, exactly!
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I see the evolution of consciousness as the end-goal of evolution … with more complex nervous systems being able to channel more awareness and consciousness from the great “source” of consciousness…
Because the evidence is overwhelming.
You appear to think that a scientific theory must answer every question you pose or it is somehow without validity. When I was a young man, the Theory of Photosynthesis was not all that detailed. At least in the textbooks available to me at the time, nobody knew exactly how a photon from the sun caused a green plant to store solar energy. Because the biochemical details were poorly understood in those days, would you say that the Theory of Photosynthesis was invalid and that people should not have assumed that plants didn’t gather energy from sunlight and support their metabolism through solar power? Their “dogmatism” about photosynthesis theory was justified because of the piles and piles of EVIDENCE that plants could use sunlight to build carbohydrates molecules for energy storage. Not until years later did I read that scientists could answer detailed questions about how photons from the sun added energy to ATP molecules and transferred that energy to all sorts of chemical reactions in each cell of the plant.
So why are you assuming that the Theory of Evolution is invalid if at this point in the history of science we don’t have a complete understanding of the brain and “self-awareness”? I don’t understand your “logic” on this. (As someone else observed, it sounds like you are playing the “gotcha card” logical fallacy.)
Meanwhile, how does the evolution-denying Christian explain the origin of “self-awareness”? To say that “God did it” is a theological, not scientific, explanation which both evolution-affirming and not-evolution-affirming Christians can declare with complete confidence. So I don’t understand your argument here. Why do you address your question to evolution-affirming scientists but not others? Can you help me out with this? I don’t understand your argument.
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I assume you are making a joke similar to the old one about the bored child who isn’t paying attention in class but gets called upon by the teacher. His friend had advised him before that: "If you get called on and don’t know what to say, just remember that the most likely answer to every question is either ‘God!’ or "Jesus!’ "
Obviously, “God did it” is a theological answer, not a scientific one. Even at a evangelical university, you will flunk if your answer on science test questions like “How does a plant harness solar energy?” or “How do you explain the orbit of Mercury?” is “God did it.” Such answers confuse the distinction between Proximate Causation and Ultimate Causation. Science is solely focused on the former. It sounds like you are focused solely on the latter. But why?
@Hisword, I look forward to your answers to the questions I posed to you yesterday. Because you are a Christ-follower, I’m particularly concerned that you retract your false claims about CERN allegedly declaring that they deny the existence of God and that they nicknamed the Higgs Boson “the God particle” in order to make an atheistic claim. Now that you know the truth about this, do you agree that the false claim was basically erroneous gossip and shouldn’t be circulated by Christians?
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It sounds like this question is trying to determine if BioLogos is merely a Deist site. The Mission Statements of BioLogos allows for the ongoing communion between God and His human devotees. As long as God is communicating through prayer and inspiration in Real Time, there is no fear of Deism.
As to how many times God might have stepped into the evolutionary process by means of miraculous intervention (as opposed to his ongoing connection to lawful natural processes that he established since Creation), is anyone’s guess … and frankly, has more to do with a person’s sense of aesthetics than anything else.
Mission Statements Listed Below…
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
[[ ^^ Hey @BradKramer, notice how you have “our-mission” in the URL ? What if the phrase “Mission Statements” was added specifically to the header? “What we Believe” is certainly fine. But this is not mutually exclusive, right? It’s sometimes a little hard to quickly execute the phrase:
"BioLogos ‘What We Believe’ Statements… etc etc. ( Just my :2cents: 
) ]]
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
What We Believe
1.We believe the Bible is the inspired and authoritative word of God. By the Holy Spirit it is the “living and active” means through which God speaks to the church today, bearing witness to God’s Son, Jesus, as the divine Logos, or Word of God.
2.We believe that God also reveals himself in and through the natural world he created, which displays his glory, eternal power, and divine nature. Properly interpreted, Scripture and nature are complementary and faithful witnesses to their common Author.
3.We believe that all people have sinned against God and are in need of salvation.
4.We believe in the historical incarnation of Jesus Christ as fully God and fully man. We believe in the historical death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, by which we are saved and reconciled to God.
5.We believe that God is directly involved in the lives of people today through acts of redemption, personal transformation, and answers to prayer.
6.We believe that God typically sustains the world using faithful, consistent processes that humans describe as “natural laws.” Yet we also affirm that God works outside of natural law in supernatural events, including the miracles described in Scripture. In both natural and supernatural ways, God continues to be directly involved in creation and in human history.
7.We believe that the methods of science are an important and reliable means to investigate and describe the world God has made. In this, we stand with a long tradition of Christians for whom Christian faith and science are mutually hospitable. Therefore, we reject ideologies such as Materialism and Scientism that claim science is the sole source of knowledge and truth, that science has debunked God and religion, or that the physical world constitutes the whole of reality.
8.We believe that God created the universe, the earth, and all life over billions of years. God continues to sustain the existence and functioning of the natural world, and the cosmos continues to declare the glory of God. Therefore, we reject ideologies such as Deism that claim the universe is self-sustaining, that God is no longer active in the natural world, or that God is not active in human history.
9.We believe that the diversity and interrelation of all life on earth are best explained by the God-ordained process of evolution with common descent. Thus, evolution is not in opposition to God, but a means by which God providentially achieves his purposes. Therefore, we reject ideologies that claim that evolution is a purposeless process or that evolution replaces God.
10.We believe that God created humans in biological continuity with all life on earth, but also as spiritual beings. God established a unique relationship with humanity by endowing us with his image and calling us to an elevated position within the created order.
11.We believe that conversations among Christians about controversial issues of science and faith can and must be conducted with humility, grace, honesty, and compassion as a visible sign of the Spirit’s presence in Christ’s body, the Church.
Core Commitments
•We embrace the historical Christian faith, upholding the authority and inspiration of the Bible.
•We affirm evolutionary creation, recognizing God as Creator of all life over billions of years.
•We seek truth, ever learning as we study the natural world and the Bible.
•We strive for humility and gracious dialogue with those who hold other views.
•We aim for excellence in all areas, from science to education to business practices.
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As has been pointed out to you, that’s wrong. That’s not why the Higgs was called the God Particle, and in fact the Higgs isn’t called the God Particle by physicists. I spent 5+ years getting my PhD in particle physics and another ten years as a physicist, and in that time I heard physicists call the Higgs “the God Particle” precisely zero times.
So you stand by a statement that is trivially false. Okay.
There is no “CERN conclusion” about God. CERN is a community of physicists. The conclusions they draw as a community are conclusions about physics, not about God. There’s no difference between physics done by a believer and that done by a nonbeliever.
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The distaste has more to do with the lack of curiosity than anything else, as well as equating ignorance with the actions of God.
Imagine all of the things we now know that wouldn’t have been discovered if we just said “Well, God must do it so we might as well stop all research and go home”. It would seem to me that the “God of the Gaps” argument is bad science, bad logic, and bad theology.
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