Any Christians believe in macroevolution?

[AV1611VET]

Matthew calls Adam "son of God". We're talking about the gospel of Matthew.

No, Matthew doesn't call Adam 'son of God'.

 

[nebulaJP]

Lucas,

Naturalistic Pantheism (the definition of which is readily available by doing a Google search), is a belief that nature is "sacred" and expresses a sense of wonder when contemplating the universe. It is not much different from Atheism. It has only been about a month since I stopped believing in Jesus and I'm still trying to figure out what my professed "religion" or belief system is. I really don't know whether I'm an Atheist, Apatheist, Agnostic, Pantheist etc. There are Wiki articles for each of these schools of thought.

You were totally right that my comment used circular reasoning. You got me. I really wasn't trying to make a formal argument with that comment. I was only setting up my list of miracles and explaining what I would believe if, hypothetically, it was somehow scientifically proven that the Bible was divinely inspired. However, as you have said, you don't care what I believe so I apologize for giving you this unnecessary, unwanted info.

However, if you want that idea in a form that doesn't use circular reasoning, here:

A. We should not expect allegorical/fictional stories to explicitly state they're allegorical/fictional, as this would ruin their narratives.

B. The stories in the Bible that we happen to be able to scientifically investigate have been proven to be allegorical/fictional.

C. The scientifically unverifiable stories in the Bible are allegorical/fictional as well.

Interestingly, it appears that after I copied and pasted that paragraph from the Wiki "Genealogy of Jesus" article, the Genealogy of Jesus Wiki article was changed because I can't find that particular paragraph anymore. However, the same info about the connection between Joseph and Heli is still present in the article.

I haven't even seen the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew and have only been talking about the one in Luke this whole time.

I think you're trying to make it appear that I'm some kind of disrespectful blasphemer or something. You seem to be suggesting that I am positing that the God of the Bible had sex with a woman in order to make Adam. I'm not saying that. You said something like "God is not the father of Adam, is He?" I merely said that I infer that since, in the Genealogy in Luke, Adam is called the son of God, that God is Adam's father. God being Adam's father doesn't have to involve a woman. In a sense, a robotic engineer (if male) can be the "father" of a robot without involving a woman, no?

I really think that you should admit that your statement that "all (with "all" in bold) your examples have them using the non-literal truths of the story" was unfounded. I admitted that I was using circular reasoning with my comment about miracles being implausible. It's not a big deal to admit you're "wrong" in some sense, sometimes. Your explanations for things are extremely convoluted. Also, you were completely wrong that I "would have done better to post this" in the Theology section. As a non-Christian I'm not even allowed to post up there and I don't need the people answering my OP to be Christians anyway. I only wanted to get a consensus as to whether people, Christian or not, when reading the "examples" feel that the authors believe in a literal Adam (or Eve or Cain etc.). To me personally, they all believe in a literal Adam. They throw Adam or whomever into their writings, whether they are evoking any "non-literal truths" (of the early Genesis stories) or not.

I understand that "Bible" means a collection of books. If one individual author of one individual book says something, then to me, "The Bible" says it. Doesn't the Bible say anything about "all scripture" being "God breathed" or something? Isn't it the "Word of God". Why do I have to say "Luke says…" for example? I prefer to say "The Bible says (or reads)…..such and such". You're not the first one in this thread to tell me that the Bible is a collection of books with many different writers and I just wanted people to know that I'm aware of this.

I will respond to your other points, I just have to read through everything again.

 

[nebulaJP]

I was wrong, this paragraph hasn't been removed from the article:

Lastly, some, from as early as John of Damascus, view “as was supposed of Joseph” as a parenthetical note, with Luke actually calling Jesus a son of Eli—meaning, it is then suggested, that Heli (Ηλι, Heli) is the maternal grandfather of Jesus, and Luke is actually tracing the ancestry of Jesus according to the flesh through Mary.[14] Therefore per Adam Clarke (1817), John Wesley, John Kitto and others the expression "Joseph, [ ] of Heli", without the word "son" being present in the Greek, indicates that "Joseph, of Heli" is to be read "Joseph, [son-in-law] of Heli".

Lucas, here is your link. Last paragraph in the "Luke’s genealogy" section.

 

[nebulaJP]

Everyone at the time the story first circulated would have known. Paul is 1500 years later. Paul wants to make a point about the subservience of women. So he rationalizes with the Adam and Eve story. Interestingly, Jesus in Mark 10 and Matthew 14 uses part of the story to justify the equality of men and women and correct a blatant inequality and injustice toward women.

So, are women subservient to men? C'mon, in Genesis 1 God creates men and women together equally. Paul is misusing scripture here as rationalization for his own misogyny.

And yes, lots of people for the last 2,000 years insist on taking the stories literally. However, there have always been Christians telling them they were wrong to do so. As just a few examples over the centuries, we have St. Augustine in the early 400s, John Calvin in the early 1500s, and Francis Bacon in the early 1600s. That people persist in error when they are being told the truth is not "didn't know".

I've seen theories that posit everyone in the first century knew that the Jesus story was only myth. You are talking about Adam, but I'm saying something else - that the same thing you're saying about Adam is also true of Jesus.

Here you have the premise that "the NT is to be taken literally". Notice the "If" in front of that. That "If" denotes you are making a premise. That premise is in error. Not all the NT is to be taken literally. Nor is everything Paul states supposed to be taken as "gospel" and without error.

For instance, Paul in 1 Thessalonians states that women should not have leadership positions in church. My denomination (and many others) has decided that should not be taken as any type of truth, literal or non-literal. I am arguing that the same applies with Paul trying to make women "subservient". Paul was a great preacher. It doesn't mean that everything he uttered is theologically true.

You win. I'll stop taking the New Testament literally.

The point is that the phrase is unnecessary to the point the author is making. Take the phrase out and Jude's point stands, doesn't it? The author may have believed it, but the phrase has no bearing on the theological truth the author is trying to convey.

PLEASE ANSWER THIS QUESTION: How does the mention of Adam in the Jude verse use the "non-literal truth" of the Adam story?

 

[nebulaJP]

That's it, the non-literal truth. Let's face it, having Adam created before Eve does not mean that women should be subservient to men. The order of creation doesn't confer subservience. What's more, Paul knew very well that in Genesis 1 men and women are created together. So Paul is using a well-known story as his rationalization that women should be subservient to men. As I discuss in more detail below, you can argue that Paul's conclusion is faulty and contrary to God's intention. That Paul uses what turns out to be a "false" creation story is actually beneficial for God, isn't it?

I think that is significant. It looks like God is preventing the authors from any important theological message being dependent upon a literal Adam. In fact, it's the opposite. In your example, only a faulty theological message is tied to a literal Adam and Eve. In Paul's argument, the conclusion is faulty, isn't it? God didn't really intend for women to be subservient to men. What better way to correct Paul's mistake than to have Paul's argument based upon a faulty premise?

I keep asking this question but I can't get a straight answer. How is a "faulty premise" a "non-literal truth"?
I can see how it's a non-literal UNTRUTH but not a non-literal TRUTH of the type you originally described, Herculean physique for example. Herculean physique is a non-literal truth if it is true that the person who is described as having a Herculean physique has a muscular physique. However, if a person is described as having a Herculean physique and this person has a wimpy physique, it would be evoking the non-literal untruth of the Hercules story, as it relates to this individual with the slight physique.

Similarly, if it is untrue that women should be subservient to men, Paul was not evoking the non-literal truth of the Adam and Eve story, but rather the non-literal untruth of the story. Correct?

 

[nebulaJP]

Other species also do environmental damage. I grant that humans are better at it because of their technology, but beavers destroy the environment of a field when them dam a stream. Locusts and army ant swarms destroy the environments of the areas they infest, overpopulation of deer will destroy the environment of a forest, etc.

How is that relevant? I said we're not the most moral species. Are you saying beavers making dams makes beavers more immoral than us? Ok what about genocide and torture? I suppose you'll cite examples from the animal kingdom, cats playing with mice, torturing them. Umm….I really think we're the most evil species on the planet. Our superior intellect should make us "know better" and be more moral or "good behaving" than any other species, but it doesn't. Are there any serial killing animals, who kill other animals for some purpose other than to eat them? Animals who kill other animals just to amuse themselves or for some sadistic pleasure? Maybe, but do they then taunt the animal police, sending in letters to the local animal TV station analogous to the BTK strangler? I didn't think so.

Are you sure you can say that? Remember, for us to evaluate "superior intellect" we do 2 things: 1. look at technology and 2. communicate with them. If a species does not have tool making ability, we never consider "intellect". Also, a species (dolphins, for example) could have equal or superior intellect to humans but we can't communicate with them to find out.

Interesting. No, I'm not sure. You have a good point here. Maybe there are other species on the planet with a more developed sense of morality than humans have. I'm agreeing with you. Animals should totally get an afterlife if humans do. It's not fair.

You can't say that because we can't have a discussion about morals with any other species. We know what our morals are because we communicate them with each other. But a "moral sense"? Not so much.

Good point. I am officially sending this part of my theory back to the drawing board.

Are you sure? Perhaps a lot of our "advanced human reasoning" is based on the ability to extrapolate consequences of behavior. Certainly scientific reasoning is based on the ability to extrapolate consequences of hypotheses.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure. There is some kind of proto-morality (at least) that all social animals have and I think it's very instinctual. This is how social groups, and therefore the members of social groups, are able to survive.

Are you sure about that "basic morality"? I would say that we teach our offspring very early what is "basic morality". We provide painful consequences for "bad" behavior to our children, do we not? Infants beat on each other regularly; we enforce that "basic morality" by punishing them.

Yeah, I really think that basic morality is something like an instinct. Infants may beat on each other but do they really "get medieval" on their playmates? Puppies have mock fights but I've never heard of a puppy killing another one by clamping down on its throat until it suffocates.

Male lions are solitary. It is one adult male and a harem of females. So, killing an invading male is self-defense. Killing the kittens of the previous male allows the females to ovulate and get pregnant by the current male lion.

I didn't say that male lions tolerate other male lions. I said lions are a social species. You have a pride of lions with a male lion and some female lions. That's social. You said:

I
First, felines are not social animals.

This is not true of the two feline species that I mentioned: lions and domestic cats. Lions and domestic cats are both social animals as I explained in my previous post about this.

 

[AlexBP]

You're right, we've been talking past each other because I only mean knowing the difference between right and wrong in the way that it matters to animals in practice and defining morality using a dictionary.

I agree; dictionaries are required to define everything in a few words. This may work for definitions of words like "hat" or "cat", but with something like "morality" a meaningful definition necessarily involves wrangling with philosophical arguments at length.

For the purposes of this thread, this branch of the discussion began when I said that morality began at some point in the evolutionary process and that I couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when it started. You asked me why I believed that morality began there, rather than including animals whose behavior might have been interpreted as moral. Now that we've got our two different definitions of morality sorted out, I hope my answer is clear.

 

[nebulaJP]

For the purposes of this thread, this branch of the discussion began when I said that morality began at some point in the evolutionary process and that I couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when it started.

I do not know the answer to these questions. I instead approach the issue of immortal souls and original sin in this way. We humans can look at our closest neighbors on the evolutionary tree: chimpanzees and gorillas and the like. We can see that they are purely animals. They have no ability to think and no moral sense, and hence it would be meaningless to praise or blame them for anything that they do. Humans beings, and the other hand, can think and have a moral sense, so one can rationally praise of human for ding something right and blame a human for doing something wrong. If we find that all human beings (except small children) do things which are morally wrong, then that is original sin. G. K. Chesterton gave an alternate phrasing of the idea

Well, sin is a transgression against God. One would need to know what going against God means to commit a sin. So whoever the first human was that God spoke to and gave instructions would be the first capable of sinning.

I don't believe in "sin" as something that exists in the real world ("sin" meaning "a transgression of divine law"). Sin existing would require that a deity interacted with us in some way so that we would know what the deity's laws are. On the other hand, morals, or the "understanding the principles good behavior" or the "ability to differentiate right from wrong" is something I believe all social animals have (right and wrong being defined by the social group whether human or animal).

I should have made that distinction earlier in the discussion. If you are only saying that animals are incapable of sinning I totally agree with you. There isn't any evidence that a deity gave laws to any animals (but in my opionion there isn't any evidence one gave rules or laws to any humans either).

The demise of my Christianity went thusly: The story of Adam and Eve eating the fruit in the Garden of Eden never happened. Therefore, "sin" does not exist. Therefore, there was no reason for Jesus to sacrifice himself on the cross.

Even if "sin" did really exist, why couldn't omnipotent God have resolved the "sin problem" from heaven? Why was God, who is supposed to have infinite power, restricted in his abilities as to how he could resolve the sin problem? Why was something as primitive as a "human sacrifice" necessary? Answer: it wouldn't have made as good of a story without the cross. Adam's sin sets up a conflict in the Bible's narrative and the cross is the dramatic resolution of that conflict. The Bible would have only been a page long if God had just "fixed" the "sin problem" immediately after Adam ate the fruit. So in my opinion, "sin" is only a narrative device.

 

[lucaspa]

However, if you want that idea in a form that doesn't use circular reasoning, here:

A. We should not expect allegorical/fictional stories to explicitly state they're allegorical/fictional, as this would ruin their narratives.

B. The stories in the Bible that we happen to be able to scientifically investigate have been proven to be allegorical/fictional.

C. The scientifically unverifiable stories in the Bible are allegorical/fictional as well.

B is not true. For instance, Genesis 1 is NOT allegorical. What is more, there are several claims within it. One of those claims is that the Babylonian pantheon does not exist. Do you consider that "fictional"?

There are different types of truth. Let's take this out of the Bible so we can look at it more dispassionately. Let's look at Shakespeare's Macbeth. The play is set in a fictional Scottish history. Yet the play is still popular because it talk about human truths; truths human nature. It talks about greed, power, the corruption of power, justice, etc.

Genesis 1 is set in the best "science" of the time: the Babylonian. That science has been shown to be wrong. However, Genesis 1 was meant to talk about theological truths. Those truths work in modern science just as well as they do in the Babylonian science in which they are set.

C is a non-sequitor. It is based on the fallacy of induction. Let's put this in science: 99.999+% of all scientific theories ever proposed have been wrong. Therefore, according to C, all future theories are going to be wrong.

I haven't even seen the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew and have only been talking about the one in Luke this whole time.

That doesn't make any sense. You were saying the only difference between the geneologies was Heli. Instead, there are no congruences between the geneologies of Matthew and Luke.

You seem to be suggesting that I am positing that the God of the Bible had sex with a woman in order to make Adam. I'm not saying that. You said something like "God is not the father of Adam, is He?" I merely said that I infer that since, in the Genealogy in Luke, Adam is called the son of God, that God is Adam's father. God being Adam's father doesn't have to involve a woman. In a sense, a robotic engineer (if male) can be the "father" of a robot without involving a woman, no?

Only in the loosest metaphorical sense. In precise terms, a robot engineer is the "maker" or "inventor" or "manufacturer" of the robot. But you weren't talking in the metaphorical sense, as this paragraph made clear.
" I infer that since, in the Genealogy in Luke, Adam is called the son of God, that God is Adam's father."

Now, when you "infer" you have to use all the evidence. The rest of the list refer to "son" in the biological sense, do they not? However, you can't "infer" just based on the geneology of Luke, can you? You must also look at Genesis 2, where you find out Adam is not the biological son of God, but rather a manufactured being (out of dust). So you cannot build upon any inference of Adam being a biological son of God.

Also, you were completely wrong that I "would have done better to post this" in the Theology section. As a non-Christian I'm not even allowed to post up there

My apologies for not noticing your faith icon.

I understand that "Bible" means a collection of books. If one individual author of one individual book says something, then to me, "The Bible" says it. Doesn't the Bible say anything about "all scripture" being "God breathed" or something? Isn't it the "Word of God".

1. The verse is 2 Timothy 3:16. It says that the Bible is inspired (which is what "God-breathed" means) and that is is useful for a very limited number of tasks. You should look that verse up.
2. The Word is Jesus. Every other time "word" appears in scripture referring to scripture, it is not capitalized. There is a new religion called Fundamentalism that does refer to the Bible as "Word of God" and does apparently think that God dictated the Bible.

Why do I have to say "Luke says…" for example? I prefer to say "The Bible says (or reads)…..such and such".

Because it is Luke who is saying that. The Bible represents the different experiences of different people with God over at least 1500 years. Luke portrays Jesus differently than Matthew, for instance. Matthew is writing for a Jewish audience and, for instance, his birth narrative consciously tries to make Jesus similar to Moses, so that it will be easier for the Jewish people to accept.

As another example, Mark is the earliest gospel. In it Jesus' tomb is a typical Jewish tomb cut into rock with a small rock across the entrance to keep out scavenging animals. By the time Luke wrote his gospel, the Jews were saying that the women stole the body. So in his story the rock is now so big that it would take 3 men to move it. Matthew was written later. By then the accusation is that all the male disciples took the body. So now not only is there a huge rock covering the tomb, but there are 2 legionaires standing guard!

By insisting on "the Bible", you are just setting up a strawman to attack.

 

[lucaspa]

No.

Luke 3:23 And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli,

Thank you for reinforcing my point. Jesus is NOT the son of Joseph, but the geneologies continue as tho he were -- as the verse shows. This verse gives Heli as the father of Joseph, but Joseph is not the father of Jesus.

 

[lucaspa]

I keep asking this question but I can't get a straight answer. How is a "faulty premise" a "non-literal truth"?
I can see how it's a non-literal UNTRUTH but not a non-literal TRUTH of the type you originally described

You asked what was the "non-literal truth" that falsifies that women are subservient to men. What I pointed out was that the subservience is based upon a non-sequitor. Yes, Eve was created later, according to th story, but that would not make her subservient.

As written, Genesis 2-3 is allegory. Adam means "dirt" in Hebrew, and Eve means "hearth". So we have a story of Dirt and Hearth, and the allegorical nature is clear.

Similarly, if it is untrue that women should be subservient to men, Paul was not evoking the non-literal truth of the Adam and Eve story, but rather the non-literal untruth of the story. Correct?

Paul was evoking a non-sequitor. To counter Paul's claim, you must look at the non-literal truth of the story. And that truth is the supposed order of creation has nothing to do with relative ranks. Instead, the truth in the story is that Eve is created as an equal companion and "helpmeet" for Adam, not to be subservient.

 

[Split Rock]

Paul was evoking a non-sequitor. To counter Paul's claim, you must look at the non-literal truth of the story. And that truth is the supposed order of creation has nothing to do with relative ranks. Instead, the truth in the story is that Eve is created as an equal companion and "helpmeet" for Adam, not to be subservient.

However, she was made subservient as part of The Curse... correct?

 

[nebulaJP]

Lucaspa, when I ask you a question you answer. What's up with waiting over a year to respond to my posts? I don't even care about any of this anymore.