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Any Christians believe in macroevolution?

AlexBP

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When I say that animals have no morality, I would point first to the animals closest to us in evolutionary terms, which are chimpanzees. While Hollywood may portray them as cute and cuddly, they're actually savagely violent. They will attack humans, other chimps, and other animals, for no apparent reason. They'll even eat their own kids. You may remember the unfortunate story of Travis, the pet chimp in Connecticut that attacked and almost killed a woman before being shot by the police. Well, that is normal chimp behavior. There's no reason for it other than that chimps and chimps.

When a human being attacks another human being, we can make moral judgments about it. Generally we'll say it's morally wrong unless there's a mitigating circumstance such as self-defense. But I've never heard anyone applying the concepts of moral right and wrong to what Travis did. He attacked that woman because it was his nature as a chimpanzee to be violent.

As for cats, just consider cat behavior in the wild. Tom cats will fight each other to the death over control of territory and females. They'll also kill any kittens other than their own. Are these actions morally right or wrong? I would say that morality simply doesn't exist in the animal world. Some animals we can train to not bite and scratch. (Others we can't even do that.) But then again we can also train cats and dogs to fight. If an animal is trained to be violent, does it ever put a paw to its chin and contemplate the moral ramifications of being violent?
 
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Cabal

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Yeah, that's nice.

You said they match literally. They simply don't. They don't give the same name of Jesus' grandfather, so you have to resort to non-literality straight off the bat.
 
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AV1611VET

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Yeah, that's nice.

You said they match literally. They simply don't. They don't give the same name of Jesus' grandfather, so you have to resort to non-literality straight off the bat.
How many grandfathers do you have? do their names match literally?
 
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Cabal

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How many grandfathers do you have? do their names match literally?

So you're saying the gospel writers couldn't even figure out who Jesus' actual grandfather was? How then is it certain they got the rest of the genealogy right?

Either way, the point still stands - you can't read the genealogies literally and have them agree, you have to start resorting to nonliteral excuses, sorry, interpretations.
 
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AV1611VET

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So you're saying the gospel writers couldn't even figure out who Jesus' actual grandfather was?
Cabal, they got the genealogies correct.

Jesus had two grandfathers -- both names given.

Do I really have to spell this out for you?
 
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AV1611VET

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Either way, the point still stands - you can't read the genealogies literally and have them agree, you have to start resorting to nonliteral excuses, sorry, interpretations.
I beg your pardon?

Who can't read the genealogies literally? you? what's stopping you?
 
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Cabal

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Cabal, they got the genealogies correct.

Jesus had two grandfathers -- both names given.

Do I really have to spell this out for you?

What, two grandfathers who both begat the same child, Joseph?

Do I really have to spell the problems with that out for you?
 
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Cabal

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I beg your pardon?

Who can't read the genealogies literally? you?

Neither can you, you're just under the impression you can, and it works about as "well" as your other "literal" readings of the text.

what's stopping you?

Obvious problems like Joseph having two fathers?
 
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sfs

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People have spent their whole life to study the genealogies in the Bible. So I tend to put more credibility with the people who are experts in a subject.
You mean people like Timothy Luke Johnson? "The question of historicity is in this case futile and even fatuous. A better question concerns the function of the birth list." (From his commentary on Luke, in the Sacra Pagina commentary series.)
 
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Hespera

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You mean people like Timothy Luke Johnson? "The question of historicity is in this case futile and even fatuous. A better question concerns the function of the birth list." (From his commentary on Luke, in the Sacra Pagina commentary series.)

Love that word, "fatuous".
 
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nebulaJP

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If you Google 'animal morals' and read scientific articles about it you'll see that social animals do have morality. Following are two relevant quotes. The first is by Mike, the person who solved the problem of the first question in my original post and the second one is by myself and was an answer to a question in another thread. Also, I have a thread going called "Can someone explain what Sin is?" in the Ethics and Morality forum to work on the problem of the second question from my original post.


Does morality exist without God? Why would it?
OR/
Why would it not?

I can see how in a fantasy world (the Garden of Eden) with a preprogrammed, fully formed, directly created man (Adam), the man wouldn't know the difference between right and wrong - not unless his programming included the morals (or common sense) that, in the real world, every social animal has developed naturally through evolution in order to ensure the survival of its species. If this man wasn't preprogrammed with an understanding of these rules of good conduct he would need God to personally teach him. But here's a more realistic reason for why we have morals that doesn't rely on this fantastic scenario:

To say hi to others is good. To kill them is bad. These two things are not arbitrary. If every member of a species was prone to do the latter that species would die out.

So the 'rationale' for social animals (animals that depend on the group to survive), especially mammals, is:

Kill my kind

I die

Don't kill my kind

I live

Hurt my kind

I hurt

etc.

I don't think you need anything special to explain empathy (or extrapolation - "I prefer not to be murdered, perhaps others of my kind feel the same way"). Why would empathy be any harder to develop than any other concept we conceive of with our relatively advanced, homo sapiens brains (God given through evolution or not)?
 
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lucaspa

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First, you would have done better to post this in the Origins forum under General Theology. You will find most of the Christians there.

Second, I accept evolution because the evidence is overwhelming. I follow the route of Christians before me, see the first quote in my signature.

Third, there are other ways for stories to be fictional than allegory. Adam and Eve are allegory. You can tell that by the "names" -- Dirt and Hearth. The stories of Cain and Abel and the 2 flood stories are not allegory.

Fourth, however the Biblical authors personally considered the stories, all your examples have them using the non-literal truths of the story. For what I mean by this, it might be helpful to take this out of the Bible to the present day and see how we use fictional stories as illustration in our own lives. For instance, when I am forgetting things, I say that I am being an "absent minded professor", referring back to the character in the movie of that title. I am not thinking that character was literally real. People refer to romances between 2 people from families that hate each other as a "Romeo and Juliet romance". That doesn't mean Romeo and Juliet were real people. Similarly, we often hear of a muscle builder as having a "herculean physique". Hercules is still fictional.

Do you see what I mean here? If the stories are widely known, we can refer to them to make points we want to make without the stories being literal history.

1 Chronicles 1:1-27
(Genealogy from Adam to Abraham)
It was common at that time to make up geneologies. Aeneus had a geneology going back to Apollo. Does that make Apollo a real god? In this case, there is a theological reason to make such a geneology: to tie the "father" of the Israelites back to the supposed first man.

Look at all those that use "as" or "like". Those are similes. A simile that doesn't use those words is a metaphor. "herculean physique" is a metaphor. It means the person has a physique like Hercules. As I pointed out above, you don't need a literal person to do that. All you need is a well-known story.
 
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lucaspa

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When I say that animals have no morality, I would point first to the animals closest to us in evolutionary terms, which are chimpanzees. While Hollywood may portray them as cute and cuddly, they're actually savagely violent.
So are humans sometimes. As it turns out, apes have morals:
10. MD Hauser, Morals, apes, and us. Discover 21: 50-55, Feb. 2000.

A chimp will take pain itself rather than see it inflicted on another.


This is different from whether chimps have morals. Now you are saying that humans will not impose our morals on chimps. That is smart on our part. We are not about to make a moral judgement on the behavior of a chimp. But do you see that this is separate from whether chimps have moral behavior?
 
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lucaspa

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Cabal, they got the genealogies correct.

Jesus had two grandfathers -- both names given.

Do I really have to spell this out for you?
Actually, AV, the grandfather is the only name in the 2 genealogies that is the same between them. All the other names, such as the father of Joseph, is different between the lists. One of the genealogies (Luke I think) has 7 more generations than the other.

Did you ever read the genealogies?
 
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AV1611VET

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Actually, AV, the grandfather is the only name in the 2 genealogies that is the same between them.
You mean the father?
All the other names, such as the father of Joseph, is different between the lists.
It's different in my genealogy as well.

Jesus' grandfathers were Jacob (maternal) and Heli (maternal).
One of the genealogies (Luke I think) has 7 more generations than the other.
Try 36 -- source.
Did you ever read the genealogies?
I don't read.
 
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chris4243

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As far as I can tell, all the evidence points toward macroevolution. God may have intervened, but there's no obvious point in the process where we can point out "there -- that's where God intervened".

As for the Flood, there is no doubt in my mind that a global flood 4,300 years ago or so cannot have happened. (alternately, God intentionally hid all the evidence that it did happen, making Him a liar).
 
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