Where do you stand on common ancestory and why?

Where do you stand on common ancestory and why?

  • Man does not share a common ancestory with any other form of life.

  • Man shares a common ancestory with primates.

  • All life on earth shares a common ancestory with a single ancestor.


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LoG

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rmwilliamsll said:
while searching for a useful introductory essay on the topic i found:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:...otomy+tripartite+man&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=8
this is the htmlize version, there is a pdf within the url.

Thanks for the link and pointing this aspect out. Helped me to realize why I don't see eye to eye on theology matters with those in my family since they are ultra conservative Calvinites. I must have picked up the tripartite viewpoint from the plain reading of the bible and realizing that God says what He means and means what He says.


chaoschristian said:
However, are not. Seriously intrigued and not asking for a dissertation, how do you arrive at these points?

The intellectual knowledge was there for a long time but the experiential knowledge happened a little over 10 years ago in a very significant way that left no doubt to the validity. Since that time there has been many other experiences which although not as dramatic still bears witness to what I said already.

I found it significant that the bipartite viewpoint came into vogue around the time that the gifts of the Spirit ceased and they then laid dormant for around 17-1800 years. Then when the tripartite viewpoint comes back so do the gifts, which is what was prophesied would happen.

OT- I wonder if there is a correlation between those who believe in bipartite and those who believe we descended from primates.
 
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Willtor

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Ah, this "plain reading of Scripture." I don't know how to respond to this in the context of OT. The flaws are blindingly apparent, but somehow it persists. I wonder if a TE's time would be better spent in GT refuting this silly idea.
 
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LoG

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PaladinValer said:
Bipartism stopped when the "Gifts of the Spirit" ended?

I highly suggest you learn a bit of Patristics, because that's simply incorrect.

And there goes the "plain word of Scripture" as well. Scripture isn't "plain;" far from it.

I suggest you reread the post for what it says and not what you think it says. :scratch:
 
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Pats

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Robert the Pilgrim said:
I fear I'm not very good at that, I do try to make it clear that I am speculating.

Just to be clear I was just tossing out the Hebrews quote, I consider all working out of deep details of theology and of God's methods of doing things to be speculative and not to be taken tooooo seriously.

Else you end up with wars :(

Robert, I don't have a good grip on what theologies I personally I agree with at this time. However, I do think defining these things is important.

My statement at not puting words in God's mouth was not directed at you. ;)

When I said I'd rather leave a personal theology a bit vauge... I was thinking about how Jesus taught... there are some issues He just didn't clearly define. Things I feel he was demonstrating we can just take on faith and not worry too much about. I think theology is very important. But I also think there is some wisdom in Christ's example of not having it all nailed down.

And when I was talking about Heb. 4:12, it reminded of a very wacko teaching I had read about that verse from a very dangerous conservative author once.

jereth said:
There is a strong move among evangelical scholars towards a unitary or monistic view of human nature. This fits very well with Theistic Evolutionism. If man evolved from primates, it is very unlikely he has an immaterial component to his nature.

Admittedly, I need to look further into this in order to get a grasp on how you and rmwilliamsII are defining bipartite and tripartite.

However, are you saying that you do not agree with the thought that man possess, in addition to his physical body, an immaterial soul? Can you expand on that please?

Glaudys said:
Or at least an immaterial component which is separable from his physical being.

One would think that the "soul" would be seperable since it goes on without us after we pass, no?

Also, do you not think people of pagan religions do not truly have out of body experiences?
I realize that may sound kind of "out there" to some schollars.

Ecc 12:5-7 said:
5 Furthermore, men are afraid of a high place and of terrors on the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags himself along, and the caperberry is ineffective. For man goes to his eternal home while mourners go about in the street.
6 Remember Him before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed, the pitcher by the well is shattered and the wheel at the cistern is crushed; 7 then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.

This passage is refering to death. In verse 6, making referance toward death, it says, "Remember Him before the silver cord is broken..."

What silver cord? Occultists who read this passage believe Solomon had practiced out of body experiences. They describe their spirits when out of the physical body as being attatched to their bodies by a silver cord. Solomon took many pagan wives and spent some years worshiping in dark religions that were unpleasing to the Lord. So, this is not altogether unlikely.
 
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Assyrian

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Pats said:
[B said:
Ecc 12:5-7[/b]]5 Furthermore, men are afraid of a high place and of terrors on the road; the almond tree blossoms, the grasshopper drags himself along, and the caperberry is ineffective. For man goes to his eternal home while mourners go about in the street.
6 Remember Him before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed, the pitcher by the well is shattered and the wheel at the cistern is crushed; 7 then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.

This passage is refering to death. In verse 6, making referance toward death, it says, "Remember Him before the silver cord is broken..."

What silver cord? Occultists who read this passage believe Solomon had practiced out of body experiences. They describe their spirits when out of the physical body as being attatched to their bodies by a silver cord. Solomon took many pagan wives and spent some years worshiping in dark religions that were unpleasing to the Lord. So, this is not altogether unlikely.
No I think it is pure 'Dead Parrot Sketch'

Monty Python said:
'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! He's ... snuffed it!
THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!
Seriously, I think that passage in Eccles is one of the most hilarious in the bible, 'the grasshopper drags himself along...' It's classic.

Assyrian
 
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Assyrian

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In case the joys of Monty Python are lost on folks the far side of the Atlantic, you can check the dead parrot sketch here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5775099474392087542 or http://orangecow.org/pythonet/pet-shop.html Basically it is a wonderful litany of euphemisms for 'dead'.

Ecclesiastes 12 gives a similar string of morbid metaphors for growing old and dying. I think it is wonderful black humour, but we shouldn't read too much into individual expressions like silver chord or golden bowl.
 
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shernren

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(@ Assyrian) Well, that's an interesting way to read Ecclesiastes ... when I read it I keep obsessing on "Much study wearies the body". :p

I bring this up because, I would rather leave a personal theology vauge than put words in God's mouth, especially on an issue that could potentially cause harm.

I remember once discussing something theological with a friend (I think it was eschatology) and when we got to something particularly thorny, he said he was content to be "reverently agnostic" about it. I like the phrase and I like your position. :)

Something which caught my attention about what the image of God is was to ask myself: If in the Bible, all humans are made in the image of God, then anything which is not made in the image of God must not be a human. By that criterion we know a lot about what doesn't go into "the image of God". We have humans who are physically deformed, who lack limbs, with damaged brains, lacking mental capabilites, with all sorts of genetic defects. And yet most Christians would still call them human and would still say that they have the image of God. To me this indicates that the image of God is not a physical characteristic of humanity, but a spiritual characteristic: the capacity and mandate to be the representatives of God in His creation. I sometimes wonder (in sci-fi mode) about the raptors which emerged near the end of the dinosaurs' reign, were they social, did they have intelligence? If God had chosen them to be His image, then they would have had "the image of God", and perhaps the Scriptures would have been written "I will cover you with My claws until I have passed, and then I will uncover you and you will only see the tail of My glory ... " :p

Anyway, it is precisely because the image of God is something spiritual, not something biological, that it makes no difference that we came from animals. Our biological characteristics and nature are assigned by evolution; but our spiritual characteristics are directly given from God, and so one need not conflict with the other. If God chose to elect representatives which were formed by evolution, who are we to complain?

As for dualism, here's something I wrote a long while back on it:
http://www.christianforums.com/showpost.php?p=16713600&postcount=36

I mean to say that to treat the spirit and the body as fundamentally separable entities is misleading at best and deceptive at worst. If you are familiar with quantum physics (I am, as far as I can be from my layman's couch ;) ) I would compare this to another metaphor, that of quarks. Theoretically we can dissect a proton as two quarks of type A and one quark of type B, and a neutron as two quarks of type B and one quark of type A, in the same way that we can dissect a hydrogen atom as a proton and an electron. (Types A and B because I can't remember the terms offhand.) And yet there is a difference. If you do stuff to a hydrogen atom, you can get a viable electron by itself and a viable proton by itself. But as far as I know it's impossible to actually see a quark by itself. Quark theory allows us to answer many questions, and yet the theory itself states that they can never be separated, and "an individual quark" has no real meaning.

I think that contemporary Christianity views the body and the soul as the proton and electron in the hydrogen atom. God comes along and allows the person a solid whack from Death, and the spirit flies off for God to catch it in an eternal body, while the physical body stays behind to rot. I don't think it's like that at all. To me the body and the soul are more like quarks: convenient labels for an inconvenient reality. We call some parts of the human "the body" because we can see and touch and feel them and they fall sick and get broken. We call other parts "the spirit" that we can't see and touch and which apparently interact with God a lot more often than the body. But do we have a body without a spirit? A spirit without a body? Don't think so. Like I explained, I view death more like metamorphosis. The natural person becomes a spiritual / eternal person at point of death, leaving behind a husk that is its "body".


And it's not a dry meaningless debate. How you view humanity will very much determine what you do in response to it. One of the clearest examples is that traditional evangelicalism, looking at the spirit as the important "part", over-emphasizes salvation as getting someone's spirit to heaven, missing all the other important dimensions along the way.
 
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Robert the Pilegrim

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Pats said:
I think theology is very important. But I also think there is some wisdom in Christ's example of not having it all nailed down.
:amen:
One would think that the "soul" would be seperable since it goes on without us after we pass, no?
One would think.

I think the quark analogy might be somewhat useful... perhaps along with a nod to the symbiotic race(s) of Cisco's old/young friend in Star Trek: Deep Space 9.

Quarks can exist by themselves, but their half life is on the order of 1/10 raised to the 24 power.

To be something that exists for any length of time, to be something useful, a quark must be combined with another quark.

For a soul to be useful, it must be combined with a body.

Maybe :)

Certainly based on scripture we expect to have a new body of some kind...

My problem with the tripartite view is that at least by some it is used to say that this part is inherently sinful, this part can choose life, this part can't.

It is drawing fine distinctions based on extremely limited knowledge, and I think that is ... dangerous.

It also strikes me as trying to draw a distinction between us and "the brute" (to quote Hodges :) ) ... out of desparation?
I dunno.

Matthew 10:28
Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.
 
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jereth

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gluadys said:
What do you think of the view that all material entities are also spiritual entities? That there is a range of spiritual being which matches in diversity the range of material being such that each entity from quarks to quasars, not to mention all living things, have a spiritual aspect appropriate to their physical aspect?

This is the proposal of Teilhard de Chardin.

Sorry, don't buy it :D
Sounds a little like Plato reincarnated. Biggest problem though is it doesn't fit with scriptural teaching.
 
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jereth

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Pats said:
Admittedly, I need to look further into this in order to get a grasp on how you and rmwilliamsII are defining bipartite and tripartite.

However, are you saying that you do not agree with the thought that man possess, in addition to his physical body, an immaterial soul?

Essentially, yes.

According to the bipartite view or dualism, body and soul are separate ontological entities that are combined to create a human life. You can strip away the body, and the soul will still be there, fully intact.

According to unitary or monistic view, the "soul" (aka "mind") is emergent from the body, or more specifically, the brain. If you kill the brain, you kill the mind.

Dualism in Western philosophy stems from Plato, was introduced into Christianity by Aquinas, and redeveloped for the modern world by Descartes.

Monism was the assumption of the ancient Hebrews (hence in the OT there is very little hope for life after death, except for the resurrection of the body), and has been "rediscovered" by modern neuroscience and medicine. Here are some examples of specific links between brain and traditional "soul" properties:

Memory - hippocampus, temporal lobes
Judgement/planning/abstract thought - frontal lobes
Consciousness - midbrain/pons
Emotion - cingulate gyrus, frontal lobes
Spatial perception - nondominant parietal lobe
Language - dominant parietal lobe

These are over-simplified, but you get the idea. If you kill each of these parts of the brain one by one (which happens in strokes, brain tumours, etc.) you progressively lose the associated functions. When the entire brain is killed, you lose the mind altogether.

If you are interested in learning further, see this very good article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind-Body_Dualism
 
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Willtor

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No, the ancient Hebrews, despite what Spinoza says, were not monist. Spinoza was raised in a dualist environment and realized that the Hebrew Scriptures were not consistent with this environment. His religion, he realized, was not dualist. From this, he concluded monism. He even wrote up a proof that Judaism is equivalent to pantheism.

But he didn't realize that a thing does not have to be dualist xor monist.

Consider the Incarnation of Christ. Both dualism and monism lean towards breaking down the hypostatic union. In dualism, God is not Man, and the two are irreconcilable in nature. Perhaps there is space for a "third thing" but that is also heretical according to orthodox theology. Monism leans towards disputing the fundamental difference between God and Man. Yes, Christ is fully God and fully Man, but what real difference is there between God and Man? Dualism points to a contradiction, and monism points to a confusion.

Orthodox theology doesn't really permit either of them. Aquinas, just like Origen, held a decidedly dualist philosophical framework. Most Christians you talk to in the Western world, today, are dualists. But they accept some decidedly non-dualist, non-monist doctrines.

From my personal perspective, I think a proper understanding of most things theological and philosophical (e.g. mind/body/spirit questions) will flow from an understanding of the the "contradiction"/"confusion" of the Incarnation. Not that the Incarnation is a particularly awkward doctrine, but that it is sort of the archetype or pinnacle of Hebraic theology. Note that the Pharisees were never confused about what Christ was saying about himself. Their stumbling block was not conceptual.
 
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shernren

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One personal analogy I always draw on is the idea of different facets or sides to the one human being. Take a cylinder. If you look at it from the top, you see a circle, but if you look at it from the side, you see a rectangle. Essentially, the 3-D object has different 2-D projections when looked at from different vantage points.

In the same way the human being is a composite whole which does not exist in any one dimension or environment alone, but which transcends each different dimension. When a human is interacting with the physical environment, the physical environment sees the body of the human; when a human being interacts on the spiritual level with God and other spiritual forces, they see the spirit of the human. But that does not mean that they are separable any more than you can cut a cylinder into a circle and a rectangle - at least not the ones observed from different angles as projections.

What is true, however, is that a description of the various facets of a human is useful, even if the human is more than simply a sum of its various facets. For example, if we know the height and radius of a cylinder we can reconstruct it even though those are mere 1-D data; if we see just the rectangular projection of the cylinder we have enough information to reconstruct it even though the rectangle is merely 2-D. And yet the cylinder is more than just a rectangle and more than just height and radius.

That is my model of the monistic human being. I'm not sure if it is what the Bible prescribes and I won't claim that it is. But it does seem to be extremely explanative to me, and I haven't met any major objections to it yet.

Note that the Pharisees were never confused about what Christ was saying about himself. Their stumbling block was not conceptual.

That's an interesting statement. This is a major tangent, but I've always wondered if they ever saw the Messiah as the Incarnational revelation of God, instead of being the highest and most anointed prophet of all who would still be merely human. Did the Pharisee ever express the concept of Incarnation before? I don't seem to have seen it. :p
 
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Willtor

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shernren said:
That's an interesting statement. This is a major tangent, but I've always wondered if they ever saw the Messiah as the Incarnational revelation of God, instead of being the highest and most anointed prophet of all who would still be merely human. Did the Pharisee ever express the concept of Incarnation before? I don't seem to have seen it. :p

I certainly don't think they thought the Messiah would be the Incarnation of God, Himself. However, given his repeated use of "Son of Man" and allusions to his Godhood (e.g. "I Am"), the nature of the Incarnation never seems to be an obstacle. Merely that he isn't the Messiah as they expect him to be. Note how some of the Pharisees (to a much greater degree than the Sadducees, to be sure) don't seem to have any particular theological or philosophical hurdles; only personal ones. I can think of 3 off the top of my head: Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and Paul.
 
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jereth

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Willtor said:
From my personal perspective, I think a proper understanding of most things theological and philosophical (e.g. mind/body/spirit questions) will flow from an understanding of the the "contradiction"/"confusion" of the Incarnation.

With all due respect, I would disagree with you here. Personally, I have never seen any reason to associate the Christological "paradox" with the question of human nature. For me, they are issues to be dealt with separately.

With Christ, we have the problem of an immaterial God uniting with a material man to form a unitary being. Exactly how this happened is, in the end, a mystery. I agree with you that the answer here is neither dualism nor monism.

With human nature, we can legitimately debate whether man is a bipartite or unitary being. (By bipartite I mean the "traditional" view of the soul being independent the material body, rather than being emergent from it.) Modern medicine, embryology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience and psychiatry have settled the question in favour of monism. If there is a mind or soul, it is emergent from the brain and cannot exist without the brain.

And I strongly believe that if you read the Hebrew Bible without preconceptions, you'll see that the Hebrews were also monist with regard to human nature. Sure, in the NT, there appears a dualism between spirit world and material world. But even so humans are 100% members of the material world.
 
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jereth

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shernren said:
But what precisely was the Hebrew monism? Was it that the soul is completely emergent from the biological structure of the human brain?

No, I don't think they thought about it as "biologically" as we do. Hence you find the Bible often describing the heart, or even the bowels, as the seat of the thoughts and passions. It's more of an experiential description than a scientific one.

Genesis 2:7 is probably key -- humans are "dust" (i.e. earthly or created material, as opposed to heavenly/uncreated), animated by "breath" from God. Of course, this metaphysical makeup is no different from the animals (also dust + breath).

BTW, I like your "different facets" conceptualisation. Thanks for that.
 
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Pats

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jereth said:
No, I don't think they thought about it as "biologically" as we do. Hence you find the Bible often describing the heart, or even the bowels, as the seat of the thoughts and passions. It's more of an experiential description than a scientific one.

I don't see how we can have a scientific description for the soul. I don't think it has a material value in the physical world.
 
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Hence you find the Bible often describing the heart, or even the bowels

A long time ago, I read a theological essay on this, the point of which was to say that you can't automatically go from the fact that they used certain phrases ("the bowels of compassion", for instance) to saying that this meant a metaphysical, rather than metaphorical, connection with the physical organ in question.

But then I suspect the question wasn't a big one for the ancient Hebrews. The Bible doesn't really deal in philosophical concepts; it's much more down to earth and practical. The ancient Hebrews and early Christians weren't Greek philosophers hanging around the market square, as Paul's hamfistedness at Athens proves.

I suspect they were monists in practice, though.
 
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