Yearning for Faith, Searching for Solid Ground - Calling on Believers

Faith & Science Conversation
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For background, I grew up Catholic and attended a Jesuit school from the age of 4 through 18. I regret not engaging more deeply with the content in my philosophy and theology courses during that time. As a child I believed blindly, but without nurturing that faith I drifted into agnosticism, then atheism, and eventually back to agnosticism.

Now, a few years post-grad with fewer distractions, I find myself desperately wanting to believe. I know I cannot derive lasting meaning from a strictly materialist worldview. I admire those who can, but I know I cannot and do not wish to return to that way of thinking. And yet, no matter how hard I try, my mind resists the step of faith.

I do not think religion and science are in conflict, nor do I think belief in God is unreasonable. I accept modern science, evolution, etc, etc. That is not the issue. The problem is that despite reviewing nearly every popular thought exercise for faith, such as objective morality and the human experience, nothing seems to work for me. I know faith does not appear overnight, it cannot be forced, and that it shouldnā€™t rest on a single thought exercise, but I feel like I have tried every angle without finding solid ground.

The argument I have found most compelling that Iā€™m sure most of you have encountered countless times is the way humans experience love, beauty, and awe. If the universe were nothing more than matter and chance, beauty would reduce to an evolutionary by-product. But the universality, intensity, and almost ā€œobjectiveā€ quality of beauty make me suspect that it points to something real beyond us.

Of course, a materialist could counter that this sense of objectivity is an illusion. Evolution has primed us to feel awe at sunsets or to fall in love because such feelings reinforce cooperation, survival, and reproduction. From that view, beauty and love do not need to be real beyond our neurons.

A theist may reply that this still does not satisfy. If every natural desire corresponds to something real, such as hunger to food or thirst to water, then what do we make of our longing for transcendent beauty, eternal love, and something beyond ourselves? In this view, our experiences of love and beauty are not evolutionary glitches but signposts toward God.

And yet, despite how attractive this sounds, I still cannot put full confidence in it. I cannot shake the thought that my longing to believe might be clouding my judgment and leaving me vulnerable to confirmation bias. I find it difficult to move past the conclusion that evolution alone is the most likely source for these feelings. Even if I grant that the evolutionary explanation can be true at the same time as the idea that these experiences point to something more, I cannot bring myself to believe it. My heart resonates with Lewis, but my mind will not let me prefer that vision over the evolutionary account. I truly feel like I am missing something, and I would be grateful if someone could fill in the knowledge or understanding gaps I cannot bridge on my own.

I am genuinely trying to think deeply and honestly, yet I feel caught between longing and doubt. In speaking with dozens of theists over the past few months, the common thread I hear is that belief often deepens not primarily through argument but through practice: prayer, Mass, and the lived experience of relationship with God. I recognize that faith is not reducible to reason, but I do believe reason can and should provide a foundation.

I would absolutely love to hear from others who have been in a similar position: what helped you move forward, or how did you find peace in the tension between doubt and belief? Please feel free to comment directly on the aesthetic / human experience arguments, or on others such as objective morality, or simply share anything that you felt significantly helped your own faith journey, especially if you have been where I am now. Thank you!

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Welcome to the forum! It is good to hear your voice, and your thoughts resonate with me and I am sure many here. For me, a helpful thing is to come to embrace the fact that we cannot know everything with certainty, and to learn to be comfortable with doubt. Doubt is not the opposite of faith, but is part of it, it seems to me. If you are certain of something, it requires no faith on your part.
You seem to have a good handle on things, and I agree that exercising your faith is the best way to move forward. Community is important in our mental and spiritual health, and working with a community helping those both inside and outside that community is helpful in lifeā€™s journey. It will probably take a lifetime to answer those questions, and as I recall the headmaster at Jayber Crowā€™s seminary telling him in the book by that name, probably a little more.

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It is a shame we cannot teach faith, or argue faith or even pass it on. All we can do is witness the effect our faith has had on us and where we started from.

I think we can get distracted by heated discussions between people who are passionate about their beliefs and emphatic about what can or cannot be believed. At the end of the day you have to make up your own mind. Scripture is there with the basics about Christianity but whether you include all the pious baggage is another matter.

Religion is not just about eternity, but also how we liv this life. if all you do is align yourself with good intentions you may find it helps you to isolate what really matters to you. Clearly the existence of God is paramount and is the biggest step of all. Get past that and maybe the rest will fall into place.

Richard

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Not bad! I routinely shoot down arguments for God, spirit, etcā€¦ but mostly because they pretend to objective validity. This approach looks inherently subjective to me and I think that is much better. I think dealing with the subjective necessities of our life is the whole point.

My reasons for beliefā€¦ perhaps it is time for me to post these againā€¦

  1. As a physicist I have to ask myself as other physicists have asked themselves whether life as we experience really can be summed up in the mathematical equations of physics. My necessarily subjective conclusion, the same as many others, is that the very idea is absurd. Science puts our experience through the filter of mathematical glasses and to be sure this methodology has proven marvelously successful at not only explaining many things but discovering new things about the world that we never expected. But this is just looking at life in one particular way and I think it is quite foolish to confuse this way of looking at things with the reality itself.
  2. It was through existentialism that I made a connection that first gave some meaning to the word ā€œGodā€ for me (I was not raised in a religion unless it is the ā€œreligionsā€ of liberalism and psychology). I came to the conclusion that the most fundamental existentialist faith was the faith that life was worth living. I also concluded that for theists their faith in God played the same role for them in their lives, suggesting that the two kinds of faith were really the same thing in different words. That equivalence basically became my working definition for ā€œGodā€, and from there it was a matter of judging what understanding of God best served that purpose.
  3. Physicists experience shock and cognitive dissonance when they first understand what quantum physics is saying for it seems to contradict the logical premises of physics and scientific inquiry itself. But there is one thing that makes sense of it to me at least. If the universe was the creation of a deity who wanted keep his fingers in events then these facts of quantum physics would provide a back door in the laws of nature through which He could do so without disturbing the laws of nature. I am not saying that any such conclusion is necessitated by the scientific facts; only that on this subjective level where quantum physics created such cognitive dissonance for so many physicists, that this idea would make sense of it ā€“ to me
  4. I have considerable sympathy with the sentiments of the eastern mystics that logic is stultifying trap for human thought and consciousness. The result is that even if I found no other reasons to believe in a God or a spiritual side to reality and human existence I would very much see the need to fabricate them for the sake of our own liberty of thought. We need a belief in something transcendent in order for us transcend the limitations of logic and mundane (or material) reasons to give our uniquely human ability for abstraction more substance and life.
  5. I feel there are profound pragmatic reasons to reject the idea that reality is exclusively objective because it immediately takes any conviction about reality to a conclusion that the people who disagree with you are detached from reality and delusional or in some other way defective, I donā€™t believe that this is at all conducive to the values and ideals of a free society. The plain fact is that our direct contact with reality is wholly subjective and it is the objective which is the abstraction that has to be fabricated. Now I certainly think there is very good evidence that there is an objective aspect to reality but I see nothing to support taking this to the extreme of presuming that reality is exclusively objective.

And here is link1 and link2 to explanations of how these connect up to what I believe.

But are these actually biological? Or are they something which has risen in quite a separate part of our existence with its own process of development and inheritance apart from the biological one? Again I think the highly subjective nature of these are the greatest hint for them being on the right track. IOW skeptics can simply doubt the reality these feeling apart from more physical experiences ā€“ dismissing them as imaginary (and they have done so many times). Sounds like the right category of existence to me.

Now if you were talking about morality I would totally agree with an evolutionary origin. I think morality is a necessity for all organisms which participate in any kind of community. And if what we have is different from other animals it is only because we have this non-biological aspect of our existence in language and the human mind by which we give a conceptual dimension to morality which animals do not have (at least not yet as far as we can tell).

I grew up mostly outside religion, unless you characterize psychology and liberalism as such. Though I did go to a Catholic school for one year (sixth grade, last year of elementary school). And I did get introduced the Narnia series (as well as Tolkein) at that time. So I was coming much from the opposite direction, starting with science and then peeking into religion to decide if any of that stuff was worth my time and consideration.

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I spent the earliest years of my life outside religion. My parents became Christian when i was about 11.

When i look back on my journey through life, im grateful that they did because when we strip everything else away there is one absoluteā€¦death. the fundamental scientific fact is that at some point sooner or later its kaput for all of us.

When i consider the inevitable id like to think there is more. Some say that believing in the bible is but one of many alternatives for a future beyond death, however when we dive into the depths of the bible narrative we find it has so much supporting evidence, we can trace the history right back to its earliest pages. The internal consistency of its writings are significantā€¦its clearly a lot more than a made up story. The evidence is strongly in favour of the notion of God, the plight of mankind and the gospel.

The summary for me is this:

Atheist says there is no God = whether true or false, atheist dies and there is no life for him beyond this one

Christian says there is a God = if he is right he recieves eternal life after death. Even if Christian is wrong, he and the atheist end up the same at worst.

Given the above, the only person who could possibly win there is the Christianā€¦he has absolutely nothing to lose but a heck of a lot to gain. People regularly play lotto for far less than a chance at eternal life.

I have spent the last 5 years deeply studying the history of the bible. The are some overwhelming historical evidences for its narrative and these are important. The bible is far more than a book about moralityā€¦it has a well evidenced, consistent, and rich history. Id suggest you need to immerse yourself into an historical journey that js the bible, then you will be able to confidently know that faith isnt blind, faith isnt naive, faith is historical, faith is believing in a real God, faith is sourced from a real gospelā€¦these are real literal things based on real history. Socratees cannot offer us thatā€¦Islam cannot offer us a traceable history (historicaly its a fraud actually), only Christianity and the Bible can offer one those things. Study its history.

Christ came and lived among us so that we could see and believe. Sure he also said blessed are those who do not see yet believe (doubting thomas)ā€¦but he still came and lived smong us just the same right, so go amd find the history and find the historical reason for your faith.

Oh, and go help others in needā€¦i think that is a gift from God that we seek to help others. Christ said ā€œin as much as you have done it to the least of these my bretheren, you have done it to meā€ (thats the gospel in action i think)

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Take the Gospel of John as the start because it devotes much of its material to Holy Week and then the Resurrection.
The Resurrection is why I ever went to church ā€“ without it, thereā€™s no point; with it, thereā€™s little reason to not go! If Jesus didnā€™t rise from the dead, then the whole business is just a con game; if He did, then everything begins to make sense.
The first thing that makes sense is the Cross, the center of Christian theology. After it, the rest begins to fall into place.

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Please accept my welcome to this forum, and my thanks for your deeply personal explanation of where you are having difficulty understanding the enormously difficult problem of trying to find some foundation for belief in God!

My background was extermely conservative Lutheran, which claimed that the bible is absolutely certain as the inspired Word of God. As I grew, and got involved in the acedemic world of graduate physics, I gradually drifted away from the certainty that I had been taught. It did become clear that science has not been able to find any directly observable evidence that God exists, that we cannot perform experiments to directly see Him.

Before I get into anything that I feel might help you with your faith struggles, I would like to comment briefly on something that I have come to believe: God is infinite. Because God is infinite (and for those who donā€™t like the generality of this claim, just consider God as being infinite love), my understanding of God, being finite, is mathematically indistinguishable from 0% of the totality that is God. What this means to me is that God is so big that He could have a completely different relationship with every single one of the finite number of finite minds that have ever existed, based on different understandings in each of those billions of people. So my conclusion is that noone has the only true and complete understanding of God. And my purpose in telling you my understanding is not to convince you that you should believe exactly as I do. Rather, I hope and pray that something of what I tell you about my understanding can help you improve your different, personal understanding of who God is, and help you improve your relationship with Him.

When I finally rediscovered a high degree of confidence in my subjective belief that God exists, it came through a realization that there could be a reason why God would choose to create a world like the one we live in, where His existence is not obvious (I.e., where agnosticism is a viable rational interpretation). That is, it suddenly occurred to me that God could have created a whole immense universe so that He could place us here where we can experience things that we cannot experience in Heaven, but that those experiences could help us appreciate Heaven more. This includes a wide range of things, just a few examples: Helping someone in need; being in need and receiving help (or not receiving help!); controlling another person, forcing that person to bend to my will, or allowing a person to choose his or her own path contrary to what I want.

The point is that I feel quite confident that God exists, that God knows what He is doing, and that He has good reasons for designing the world the way it is. Even if I canā€™t guess at all of His reasons, when I have thought about it, I have been able to get some simplified idea of why He might have designed certain things that seem difficult to understand in the way that we can observe them to function.

Keep working on what seems important to you. I do believe very strongly that what God wants with you is a personal relationship, not just that you pay lip service to some description of God that some other person tells you is the absolute truth about God. And yet the existence of religions, and even denominations within religions, shows that there is reinforcement of a personā€™s understanding of God in communicating with others who have a similar understanding. And this forum, for me, has been a personal proof that there is potential for significant improvement in my own understanding of God from reading what others say about their understanding.

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Welcome, @marthastewart!
Other people have already given you more valuable responses than I will be able to, but I want to address a few things you said.

I think this is typical. Actually, this idea has come up in a few threads this summer. If youā€™ve been lurking, youā€™ve probably seen them.

Whether you have ā€œstuck with itā€ or not, I think faith gets harder as we mature, because we have to make it our own. We are no longer able to rely on our parentsā€™ faith to cover for us as our reasoning skills develop and we see holes or naturally develop questions that are not satisfied by ā€œSunday school answers.ā€

You have already found out for yourself that you arenā€™t going to argue yourself into faith except to see the possibility that itā€™s not unreasonable. Iā€™ve never sought out apologetics, although itā€™s popular among my part of the Church. The more I encounter them, the less helpful I find them. Because there is always a counter argument, often which I have recognized myself.

Many come down to symantics, which is not proof of anything except quirks in language and grammar. Those donā€™t help anyone.

My opinion is that you are better off without apologetics. Since you understand the problem they create, you might just ditch them. Period. And start looking at practice, such as @adamjedgar suggested, including service.

Agreed. I havenā€™t read a lot of Lewis, but I feel the same way. I do better with him, when I look at him as a brother in Christ, asking similar questions and wrestling with things. I really like how this comes through in his poem (something like) All Prayer is Idolatry. ā€œYeah, C. S. Iā€™ve been there, too.ā€

I think youā€™re normal.
Even among Christians.

There are people who will harp on the need for certainty, and that you canā€™t actually have faith, if you donā€™t have certainty. But Jesus never said we have to be certain, and he didnā€™t reject people like Thomas or the man with the blind son, who clearly doubted. ā€œHelp my unbelief!ā€

I think itā€™s ok to go forward in hope (not certainty), to study your Bible in hope, to pray in hope to worship in hope, and to start practicing in hope. Part of developing faith is to let God take care of his part.

Since you started in a Catholic church, that seems like a logical place to start again, unless you have reasons not to. There is a lot in the tradition to help bolster your budding faith, and some branches make a lot of space for thoughtful discussion.

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One problem being that to seek certainty is to seek something in and of yourself, while faith is a matter of seeking Christ ā€“ and that means looking at the Cross and the Resurrection.

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A like the sentiment there, and certainly Christ modelled that we should give of ourselves and help othersā€¦it makes sense that this would allow us to appreciate heaven more, however that isnt the reason, we must always remember an important fundamental about the gospelā€¦

The gospel exist purely because of a need to atone for ā€œthe wages of is is deathā€ (Romans 6)

God didnt put us here for the reason implied in your post aboveā€¦the bible is very clear on that. God created us ā€œin His own imageā€, creation was corrupted by sin and as a result salvation became necessary.

Moses specifically wrote ā€œIn the image of God He created them Male and Femaleā€.

God bent down close and ā€œbreathed the breath of life into Adams nostrils and he became a living personā€. Moses is clearly telling us that before God did that, Adam was not alive. If we remove ourselves from God, we die as illistrated in the arraignment of Adam and Eve in Genesis 3, 4 and again in the flood Gen 6-8. That is what corruption and subsequently atheism has done.

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I do think all Christians should be able to defend their faith (apologetics).

But yes, the gospel is strangely enough an actionable venture. Strange because we cant save ourselves and yet the ntion of salvation through Christ isnt spread unless we do the legwork. Also it seems that during Christs time what people needed was redirecting away from legalism and opression.

you know it makes me wonder if in a rather covert kind of way, Christ really did aim to bring down the Roman emporer as the Jews hoped their Messiah would?

The rise of Christianity certainly appears to run in parrallel with the downfall of that empire.

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Interesting association, but empires have always risen and fell, so not sure how you would support that. It is pretty commonly held that Christianity thrived and grew due to the relative unity of the Roman Empire making travel and the spread of ideas feasible. And perhaps you could also argue that Christianity grew due to destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple with the associated diaspora of Jews across the empire, which was a fertile ground for Christianity, then considered a sect of Judaism.

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Christ brings low all worldly empires. But people donā€™t give up the habit so easily. We surely do like our empires. And Jesus has to keep telling us, like he told Peter back then, whether gently or not so gently ā€œGet behind me, Satan!ā€ He said as much to Satan in the desert - he continues to say it to us now. But we donā€™t easily break our addictions to power. So Christians again rehearse yet another chapter of that age-old lie fed to them by Satan, and they think that this time itā€™s going to be different! This time we can run with Satanā€™s advice, do it his way - grab all the reigns of power, and this time weā€™ll succeed. Because itā€™s being done in Christā€™s name, right? Just like Satan promised Jesus the first time - this can all be yours! -Itā€™s for you, right? But unlike evangelicals today, and everybody else too going all the way back to the original disciples - unlike all of us, Jesus sees right through all that idolatry. We will learn the hard way that Satanā€™s methods donā€™t even get you the world (though they seem to at first - they certainly promise it to you). And after weā€™ve discovered weā€™ve been tricked - didnā€™t even get the world, and now lost our souls in the bargain too, Jesus will be there as he always is, to gently pick up the broken pieces and to ask once again, ā€œwanna try that my way now?ā€. Itā€™s gonna look like losing to you at first. And you do lose a lot - you lose much of the stuff that Satan taught you to chase after. But doing it my way, you win where it really counts. And actually - surprise, surprise! Youā€™ll get the world thrown in with it all in the end. But this time in a good way, and not on Satanā€™s terms. This time nations will stream to you for blessing, and youā€™ll be a blessing to all - not a curse. Thatā€™s the difference, and those powerful in the world are always the last to see it and realize it. Jesus was right about that too (wouldnā€™t you know it!) - the last are first and the first last. But eventually every knee bows, and does so in joyful worship.

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I think our best apologetic is to obey Jesus, which includes the often unpopular demand to practice and seek justice and demand it for our neighbors; prepare the way for the true king, not by oppression or coercion, but by service and demonstration of the Gospel; love our brothers and sisters in the church in our mutual relationship withJesus and love our neighbors just as much. Things like that.

Demonstrate that we believe what we say and interpret it with our actions.

ā€œRational arguments for Godā€ seem impossible to me and are always open to counterarguments. I think this leads to a fruitless cycle.

Jesus did not argue people into the kingdom. He told them about God and demonstrated Godā€™s love and mercy. He argued with those who claimed to know God and the Law but demonstrated that they werenā€™t interested in the spirit of the law, just ticking boxes.

I watch here the apologetic cudgel play. I find it a complete turn off. Maybe itā€™s a men thing. Like competitiveness in sports or something. Hard to tell since, as a woman, I am in a small minority here. But women I know in RL have no time for it either.

Following Jesus is not a matter of forms of arguments or keeping score, or who has the better video or got the most likes on it. I couldnā€™t care less

It sells books and tickets and memberships and advertisements. That is NOT the kingdom of God. That is mammon.

AND THE WORLD KNOWS IT.

They see us throwing each other under the bus as well as everyone else. Who would want more of that but with more strings attached?

We Christians need to put up or shut up. I think that is our most effective apologetic.

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Amen. :ok_hand:

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Trouble is, it is hard to be practical about something you are ignorant of.

I guess it depends on the type of apologetics that is being employed.

Indoctrination is not apologetics. An argument needs at least two sides. if you are only giving one, it is not an argument. The problem being that most people only seem to know their own beliefs and their arguments are ignorant of the reasons and rationales for the beliefs they try and condemn or dismiss.

Richard

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I do not think that the evidence supports that idea. Instead, it seems that the interaction of Christianity and emperors has changed the empires and modified the teachings within (some) Christian churches.

If we think what happened in Rome, there were repeated persecutions until the growing movement needed to be acknowledged by the emperor. Then Christianity became first accepted, then favoured and finally, official state religion. It could be argued that this change affected the Christian movement more strongly than the empire. A massive flux of ā€˜pagansā€™ to Christianity brought with them differing cultural beliefs and overwhelmed the teachings that did not support the ā€˜state churchā€™ status. Christians were needed in the army, in financial affairs and everywhere in the society, and the Christians needed to be properly included in the ā€˜state churchā€™ system from the birth onwards, to become loyal subordinates of the emperor.

After Constantine transferred the capital of Rome to Constantinople, the ā€˜Christianizedā€™ Empire of Rome continued for a millennium in the eastern parts of the former wider empire. In this empire (sometimes called Byzantine), the emperor was in practice the head of the church. For example, when Arius lost the theological debates within the church, he persuaded the emperor to support his deviating teachings. Ordered by the emperor, the church of the eastern Rome was teaching the doctrine of Arius for more than a century. Those not willing to accept the claim that Jesus was just a created being were smoked from their positions within the church.

We can see that even today, at least in Russia that thinks itself of being the ā€˜third Romeā€™, the defender of the Orthodox faith. The Russian Orthodox church supports the de facto emperor (Putin) to the point that the head of the church (patriarch Kirill of Moscow) has proclaimed that the war in Ukraine is a Holy war - all faithfull members of the Russian Orthodox church need to support and continue the ā€˜Holyā€™ war of Putin.

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Yes. I agree with you here.

I think Christianity is about a ā€œon the jobā€ training, which I know of as ā€œdiscipleship.ā€ Learning the faith is a matter of learning what is in the Bible, and core beliefs (although I understand that that list is not as settled as some of us would like to believe) and even basic doctrines.

Of course.
Unfortunately, the word ā€œindoctrinationā€ carries so much baggage, but learning some doctrine is part of the process of discipleship.

Learning doctrine is, technically, indoctrination. However, I donā€™t see that learning as equivalent to mindless assent, which is included in the common understanding of ā€œindoctrination.ā€ We have a good many Christians here who dare to think outside doctrinal lines, providing an array of examples of how this can work.

True.
And that has become the think that people understand ā€œapologeticsā€ to be ā€“ arguments.

The thing that is commonly called ā€œapologeticsā€ today is not what went on in the New Testament. Paul was willing to engage with the existing, argumentative culture of philosophical discourse in Athens, but Luke gives no praise to the Athenian culture: ā€œNow all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new,ā€ (Acts 17:21). This was not the normal mode for spreading the Gospel or giving support for it.

The early apologists usually preached, taught and explained. The delcaration was that Jesus is the Christ, and the support was developed through the Old Testament into Jesusā€™ life. ā€œThis is the declaration and the support for it. Take it or leave it.ā€ People who considered it thoughtfully and clarified things were praised for their thoughtfulness.

The preaching and explanations were backed up with the life of the church, which demonstrated that people really believed and lived by what they said they did. Some of the very earliest apologists said, ā€œCome and see!ā€ Engaging with the activity of the Church, seeing God at work and being a part of that work learning can be a more powerful apologetic than arguing.

Of course anyone can look at any of this and provide naturalistic explanations for it. The arguments and activity can only go so far, even if a person finds them compelling or desirable. The Holy Spirit is often left out of our understanding of this process. And none of this work is completed without the Spirit.

Thinking back to the OP, @marthastewart said:

Arguments will not solve this problem for her. There is no human argument that is so rock solid as to eliminate doubt. Sometimes a person just has to ā€œCome and see,ā€ dig in and and find out for themselves ā€“ ramaining hopeful.

This is learning as they go, allowing faith and trust to develop on the job.

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Perhaps argument is the wrong term, as it , like many words, has baggage.

I am not sure that there is a good word that encompasses apologetics. Stemming from the word apology, there would seem to be an element of both defence and pleading. I think it is the difference between teaching an answer and teaching options and alternatives. Preaching has always ben seen as a dogmatic, I am right, and you must follow. Christianity is notoriously exclusive. Perhaps that is why I need to apologise for my liberal beliefs.

Richad

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Hi Adam, I was taught this as the foundation of Christianity. I have come to question whether this is really Godā€™s truth, or is somewhat of a myth, because people at the time did not have any means to understand where this universe fits into Godā€™s great scheme of things.

I do not claim to have all the answers. I do claim that all of manā€™s knowledge about God, through all time and space, is mathematically eqivalent to 0% of the total knowledge of our infinite God, so no human on this earth has anything remotely representing the total knowledge of what God intended when He created this immense, but still finite, universe.

In that context I have a few questions that are not answered adequately in the ā€œstandardā€ Christian religious statements about God creating a perfect earth, and Adamā€™s sin bringing this earth into a ttay different state from what God created. My questions start with the relationship between this created universe, and the place where God, the Creator, exists outside of this universe. Does space and time as we experience thse dimensions in this created universe exist in the place where God exists, which I believe is Heaven? (Aside question: Is it reasonable to believe that Heaven is where God is, outside of this universe?) My belief is that space and time, at least as we experience those, are integral dimensions of the created universe. The evidence has become much stronger due to the development of the theories of relativity, showing that time and space are not observed the same even by denizens of this universe who are in different reference frames.

Next big question: Who am I, what am I made of (my major parts), and where do those parts come from? My belief is that I am a combination of an earthly body and a heavenly soul. I believe the earthly body can trace its origins through evolutionary science and biology to my parents, and ancestors, whoever and/or whatever those might be. I believe my soul is a heavenly creation, created by God and existing in that place where God exists. And I assert that there is no way for us humans on this earth to observe or measure or otherwise determine what the relationship between existence in heaven and existence on this earth is. So we cannot know, and I am quite sure that it is not a meaningful distnction, to say whether my soul in Heaven existed before or after it was merged with my body on this earth. (Question: Does ā€œbefore or afterā€ temporal distinction actually mean anything when comparing something in Heaven with something on this earth? I claim that it is not determinable from this earth whether there is any meaningful temporal comparison possible.

And one more big question for this thread at this time: Does it really make sense to think that God created this universe, and puts us on this earth as souls embedded in our earthly bodies, in order to give us a pass-fail test as to whether we will be allowed into Heaven? Some Christians seem to think this is what Godā€™s purpose is for putting us here. I do believe there are enough caveats in the bible about Godā€™s judgement as contrasted with human judgement or human understanding of Godā€™s judgement to discount this as Godā€™s purpose for putting us here.

That is why I have come to the conclusion that at least a part of Godā€™s purpose in putting me here, in this world where uncertainty is absolutely certain, where I do have free will to choose actions without fully understanding the consequences, and my actions will, almost certainly, have consequences, both intended and unintended, is so that I can experience some things that I cannot experience in Heaven.

I have come to believe that the whole theme of salvation can be understood as necessary in the context of consequences for actions (so we humans can understand the consequences, and see that Godā€™s love can overcome any consequences, perhaps), without becoming a pass/fail test for entry into Heaven. And my understanding of God as being infinite, and my belief that God knows what he is doing, allows me to leave it for God to judge any other person, for God to work through me, and other people, to help other people have the relationship with Him that is right for each person.

And one last comment on my quote from you above: I do believe that ā€œin Godā€™s imageā€ really means that we humans do have the capability to love, to love God, and to love our neighbors.