I agree with you about science and souls - but I wanted to point out that in this last sentence I would object to "no scientific explanation to replace". This could be seen as putting the current conventional science over faith. Especially if there is an explanation which is possible, even if implausible, that is consistent with Scripture - that is the preferred explanation of reality.
But how do you put science "over" faith? What I was saying was precisely that science has no say in the domain of what a soul is because science has no means to study the soul and because the soul seems very much to be a non-physical phenomenon (at best facilitated, instead of emerging, out of physical constructs in the brain). Faith does not conflict with science. A
scientific formulation of faith, that states that "if theories X, Y, and Z are true then faith is impossible", does contradict with conventional science. But such a position is completely unnecessary, and in my opinion, whoever takes such a position deserves all the trouble they get trying to concordize inherently separate ways to partake of creation.
I agree to the fall of Satan, but in regards to Satan not waiting for creation, were the angels and demons fighting for some 13 billion years with God holding the angels back from doing any real damage? I say that because we're told in Rev 12 that Michael will inevitably hurl Satan from Heaven down to earth before the Glorious Appearing, so he either has the power, or it is only given to him at that time. If it really was a 13 billion year spiritual war did Christ fight as an angel as He showed himself to be in the OT? Enough, most of these only
kind of relate to TE so I'll stop. Sorry, got carried away again. Just too many questions.
In any orthodox doctrine of Satan, God's permission of Satan to continue to do his work has went on for far longer than we'd like, whether it be 6,000 years or 13 billion years (if indeed these spiritual powers experience time the way we do at all). And in any such doctrine it is God's perseverance that allows Satan his imaginary freedom. Will not God end it all with just a command at the end? The whole idea of a ceasefire or stalemate in heaven between the forces of good and the forces of evil is just silly. God isn't holding back because His forces are stretched thin or because He can only afford to be defensive or because He needs time to gather reinforcements or any such military metaphor, He is waiting simply because He is waiting and He will be who He will be. Not that this has anything much to do with TE, of course, but since you raised it I might as well answer it.
I've never actually studied it, but I do know what you're talking about.
First, I'd like to note that I'm trying to be as bipartisan as possible. I'm more or less just trying to understand the TE view point on the matter.
I never implied that finding a scientific process to the rise of human intelligence would disprove God or his action in the world. At least I never meant to.
I remember talking to gluadys about this a while ago. God had to have His first contact with one human. Well, I guess it could have been a group, but the point is that at some time in history God made contact with humans. Whatever form of evolution they were in, there had to be a first. Do all animals have souls (I've heard mixed things)? Was it a byproduct of evolution? If it isn't, was this interaction at the time when God felt humans could be held accountable? Like when a child will go to Heaven if they die before they are held accountable? What happened to the other humans that didn't receive souls? Did they all receive souls? If it is, were they incapable of sinning until God felt they were knowledgeable to do so? Were they tempted by the devil? Was there a first sin? If there was, did all human conscience change at that moment like in the creation story? Does eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil symbolize God's gift of a soul?
I think that's enough questions for now.
I find your respect and curiosity refreshing, Fury
I think you will agree with me that even in a YEC view there is much that remains mysterious and difficult to grasp about what makes humans a soul. TE offers no easy answers there either.
But like gluadys and Deamiter, I would have reservations about talking of the soul as a thing-in-itself. A chair, or a sunflower, or a computer, exists as a thing-in-itself, real whether or not I use them. But what is a soul? How do you know that humans have/are souls? Well, the Christian view is that they can engage in relationships with God and with each other, in the I-Thou relationships of Buber instead of I-It relationships. That is what sets us apart from animals, especially our relationships with God. But look at what has happened: the soul is the part of us that relates, so everything we say of a soul has to be said in relation to something else. Our souls (or us souls) can bless God or curse Him, love others or hate them, but does that tell us about the soul in and of itself?
Or is the soul a way of summarizing the properties of the human that allow him/her to relate? An analogy that suggests itself here is the physical properties of, say, an electron. We consider the electron to have charge because it reacts in the presence of other charges; it has mass because it reacts in the presence of other masses; it has angular momentum because it orients itself in certain ways with an external magnetic field. But it would be impossible to conceive of an electron without its charge, and it would make no sense to speak of "charge" as something-in-itself that can be extracted from an electron. And yet we continually think of humans without souls and think of souls being sucked out of the body at death.
And I submit that this is a rather unscriptural notion. When the Bible speaks of the afterlife it happily speaks of resurrected eternal bodies, but it is circumspect and shifty about disembodied souls. In the Bible, the words used for soul derive from "breath" and the idea is the same: the part of me that makes me alive, or that is alive, is my soul. But it is one thing to say that a person who is breathing has a soul and a person who has stopped breathing no longer has one. It is a completely different thing to go on and say that this soul exists as its own entity, can go places and experience time, and has to wait out thousands of years to jack in to a new body. So I doubt that it is appropriate to speak of a soul in and of itself. Of course, there are still good uses for the word, and it has become such a powerful word that it would be a shame to abandon it altogether. But with great power comes great responsibility. Danger: handle with care.
To directly answer your questions: I believe that God would have revealed Himself to the entire human community He chose, since it would be a good reflection of how God Himself is community in the Trinity. His very act of relating to them
was, in some sense, their souls (which is after all the part / facet of us that relates). They related to God, and within that relationship was the possibility of sin. We cannot know whether or not the first sin was individual, relational, or communal, but we know that it spread through many ways which we see today: by temptation, by the occult, perhaps by some form of genetic transmission (spiritually genetic, not biologically) of the propensity to sin, by the rearing of children within sinful families, by the creation and imposition of societal structures that overlook, or encourage and reward, sin. All this created a historical web of sin that spread wherever humanity spread and enslaved humanity so that God was righteous in His judgment that "all have sinned and fallen short of My glory". It was only in the demonstrative righteousness and propitiatory atonement of Jesus Christ's life and death that humanity could hope for, and participate in, an end to sin.
This is the gospel: and it is the story that brings life, no matter how life actually started.
