Gnosticism and the belief in Evolution

[The Barbarian]

Yes, which is why we can accomplish many feats of engineering with advanced technology today, but our cosmological traditions of how the universe came into being have remained fundamentally the same since ancient times,

Changes since ancient times...
Universe isn't much bigger than the Earth to.... Universe is unimaginably larger than the Earth

Everything revolves around the Earth to... The Earth revolves around the sun, which revolves around the galactic center, which is on galaxy in billions scattered across the universe.

Planets move around the Earth because (angels, gods, demons) move them to... gravity and momentum explain the motion of planets which like the Earth, revolve around the Sun.

Time and space are absolutes. to... time and space depend on frame of reference.

Stars are lamps set in a dome above the Earth to... stars are very, very distant suns like our own sun.

Among others. You really didn't know this? Seriously?

because Enlightenment philosophers carried those ancient traditions forward and slapped the label of 'science' on them.

You were badly misled about these things and many others. Would you like to learn more about it?

 

[The Barbarian]

You're wrong about that. As we accumulate more and more evidence, it appears that God is right and the creationists are wrong. Would you like me to show you again?

Regardless of how well-supported you think it might be, it doesn't change the fact that within the scientific community, abiogenesis (life springing from non-life) has been a preformed conclusion in search of supporting evidence.

Since most scientists were theists, they assumed God created the first living things. Darwin did, for example. How could you not have known that? Yes, God says that non-living matter produced living things, but as you've seen the evidence increasingly shows that He is right.

Why was abiogenesis already concluded before the existence of a well-supported theory?

Most scientists accepted Genesis 1.

 

[lifepsyop]

Changes since ancient times...
Universe isn't much bigger than the Earth to.... Universe is unimaginably larger than the Earth

Everything revolves around the Earth to... The Earth revolves around the sun, which revolves around the galactic center, which is on galaxy in billions scattered across the universe.

Planets move around the Earth because (angels, gods, demons) move them to... gravity and momentum explain the motion of planets which like the Earth, revolve around the Sun.

Time and space are absolutes. to... time and space depend on frame of reference.

Stars are lamps set in a dome above the Earth to... stars are very, very distant suns like our own sun.

and Darwin believed the organic cell was an uncomplicated lump of jelly... what is your point exactly, I wonder?

Do you really think the belief in Evolution was going to be hindered by whatever the anatomy of the cell turned out to be? A lump of jelly or an unfathomably complex inner cellular universe? What does it matter? The evolutionist will always defer back to a belief in the mystical inevitability of time and happenstance to render forth all things from nature's substance, just as ancient man believed in millennia past.

As I said, these changes in understanding of physical structure of the universe have had little effect on the underlying evolutionistic philosophy. The philosophical naturalism is there sitting on the throne, no matter what the objective structure is discovered to be over time.

This is the philosophical tradition that has been carried forward from antiquity.

Here it is in the 1st century BC, proclaimed by the Epicurean poet Lucretius, On the Nature of Things,
where he explains how "the universe operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"),and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities."

"An early thinker in what grew to become the study of evolution, Lucretius believed nature experiments endlessly across the aeons, and the organisms that adapt best to their environment have the best chance of surviving. Living organisms survived because of the commensurate relationship between their strength, speed, or intellect and the external dynamics of their environment."
Lucretius - Wikipedia

Your insistence that the ancients all believed that gods and demons were pushing objects around is becoming tiresome, because I'm sure you know better.

 

[The Barbarian]

lifepsyop said: ↑
Yes, which is why we can accomplish many feats of engineering with advanced technology today, but our cosmological traditions of how the universe came into being have remained fundamentally the same since ancient times,

Changes since ancient times...
Universe isn't much bigger than the Earth to.... Universe is unimaginably larger than the Earth

Everything revolves around the Earth to... The Earth revolves around the sun, which revolves around the galactic center, which is one galaxy in billions scattered across the universe.

Planets move around the Earth because (angels, gods, demons) move them to... gravity and momentum explain the motion of planets which like the Earth, revolve around the Sun.

Time and space are absolutes. to... time and space depend on frame of reference.

Stars are lamps set in a dome above the Earth to... stars are very, very distant suns like our own sun.

Among others. You really didn't know this? Seriously?

and Darwin believed the organic cell was an uncomplicated lump of jelly...

Yes. And that was a huge problem for his theory, which he couldn't explain. How did new traits not just get blended out of existence in the mass of other traits? Fortunately,l Mendel's discovery explained this; inheritance is not like mixing jelly; it's like sorting beads. And so Darwin's theory was saved when Mendel's work was rediscovered. But that has nothing to do with your misconceptions about early science.

Do you really think the belief in Evolution was going to be hindered by whatever the anatomy of the cell turned out to be?

Yes. Once the issue of how new traits can persist was cleared up, Darwinian theory was much more solidly established. But that's not the point I was making.

what is your point exactly, I wonder?

I think everyone got it, but I'll spell it out: The cosmology of ancient science was very different than it is today. You were just very misled about that.

As I said, these changes in understanding of physical structure of the universe have had little effect on the underlying evolutionistic philosophy.

Our understanding of the physical structure of the universe has zero to do with evolutionary theory.

Here it is in the 1st century BC, proclaimed by the Epicurean poet Lucretius, On the Nature of Things,
where he explains how "the universe operates according to these physical principles, guided by fortuna ("chance"),and not the divine intervention of the traditional Roman deities."

Yeah, Lucretius waa kind of a rebel in that respect. So was Democritus, who offended people by declaring there is nothing but atoms.

Your insistence that the ancients all believed that gods and demons were pushing objects around is becoming tiresome,

Saying that people said things they didn't say is always tiresome. I'm merely pointing out the reality that most philosophers of the time thought that gods or whatever were making the planets move around the Earth. As you have probably realized by now, modern cosmology is very, very different than the ancient ideas. But there was never a universal consensus. The ancient astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, actually figured out that the Earth went around the sun, and his (by modern standards) crude instruments allowed him to determine that the Sun was immensely large. Most of his contemporaries didn't agree, of course.

 

[JimR-OCDS]

But they did know it, or at least it would have been familiar to the apostles' contemporaries.

No, they didn't. They accepted the creation story literally. They also thought the sun rose from the horizon. They had no idea about the solar system and the universe, other than they were lights in the dome.

Other than Matthew and perhaps John, the Apostles couldn't read or write
and classic education which St Paul Received was for the elite, not the ordinary
peasant which the Apostles were, other than Matthew.

 

[lifepsyop]

You're wrong about that. As we accumulate more and more evidence, it appears that God is right and the creationists are wrong.

I would not say that is accurate. I think the evidence continues to both resist the interpretation of naturalistic evolutionary origins and the belief in theistic evolution.

Since most scientists were theists, they assumed God created the first living things. Darwin did, for example.

and many theistic evolutionists today believe God caused the "big-bang" and created the universe... but God is continually being shuttled away from His creation, not being allowed to have any interaction with it. It's not just the Genesis Creation account, or the worldwide flood... "reasonable Christians" are not even supposed to believe in the biblical Exodus and subsequent events because "science" (conventional archeaology) says they did not happen.

This the Gnostic element of theistic evolution, where the divine source is far-removed from the state of base nature that arose from the physical essences that emanate from him. Evolution and Gnosticism are both a spirituality of "becoming", where man is enlightened with the powers of reason, or in Gnosticism receives a 'divine spark' that connects him back to the source. In both views, God is viewed as a force that does not lower himself to meddling in the lowly state of nature. (Jesus Christ, of course, contradicts that view completely)

In God's revealed word, we see that he interacts with his creation in sudden and immediate ways. For example, when the Lord descends upon Mount Sinai in quaking fire, terrifying the camp of Israel. Both the Gnostic and the Theistic Evolutionist do not like this view of God's imminence and routine interaction with his creation, and prefer the faraway distant God, who supposedly set the universe in motion 14 billion years ago and then stepped away.

 

[The Barbarian]

You're wrong about that. As we accumulate more and more evidence, it appears that God is right and the creationists are wrong.

I would not say that is accurate.

Sorry, I'll be going with God on this.

I think the evidence continues to both resist the interpretation of naturalistic evolutionary origins

Comes down to evidence, which as you know, even informed YE creationists admit is very good evidence for macroevolutionary theory.

and many theistic evolutionists today believe God caused the "big-bang" and created the universe... but God is continually being shuttled away from His creation, not being allowed to have any interaction with it.

Some ID creationists say so, but as you learned, theistic evolutionists like Francis Collins don't buy that story. ID and creationism are drifting toward deism, but Christians who accept evolution don't go that way, your projections notwithstanding.

In the end YE creationism is incompatible with God's word and His creation. Fortunately, it's not a salvation issue, so one can by a YE creationist, and still be a good Christian, so long as he doesn't make an idol of his new doctrines and insist that one must accept those additions to scripture.

 

[The Barbarian]

No, they didn't. They accepted the creation story literally. They also thought the sun rose from the horizon. They had no idea about the solar system and the universe, other than they were lights in the dome.

Some people still thought so, maybe most of them. But educated people in the Roman Empire were aware of some things. They knew the Earth was a sphere, and even had a pretty good idea of how big it was (Eratosthenes of Alexandria had used trigonometry to get the Earth's circumference at about 25,000 miles.

But they still thought everything in the universe revolved around the Earth. Many thought that Apollo drove the sun across the sky every day. And so on.

Other than Matthew and perhaps John, the Apostles couldn't read or write
and classic education which St Paul Received was for the elite, not the ordinary
peasant which the Apostles were, other than Matthew.

God uses different criteria than we might to pick his prophets and servants. Paul and Matthew were exceptions to most of His early followers. Many years ago, I heard a sermon by a priest who described Peter's experience and said that Peter wasn't very smart. But God wasn't looking for someone brilliant to give the keys. Peter had what He wanted.

 

[JimR-OCDS]

Some people still thought so, maybe most of them. But educated people in the Roman Empire were aware of some things. They knew the Earth was a sphere, and even had a pretty good idea of how big it was (Eratosthenes of Alexandria had used trigonometry to get the Earth's circumference at about 25,000 miles.

But they still thought everything in the universe revolved around the Earth. Many thought that Apollo drove the sun across the sky every day. And so on.



God uses different criteria than we might to pick his prophets and servants. Paul and Matthew were exceptions to most of His early followers. Many years ago, I heard a sermon by a priest who described Peter's experience and said that Peter wasn't very smart. But God wasn't looking for someone brilliant to give the keys. Peter had what He wanted.

There were some, who were aware of the earth being round, but it wasn't confirmed nor believed
in the Apostles culture of the time. They accepted the creation story as told and didn't dare question it.

True, God uses all sorts of people to bring His message.

One of my favorite saints is St Bernadette of Lourdes. She was considered to be stupid, and didn't receive her first Holy Communion until she was 14 years of age.

Yet, I've read the letters she wrote while in the convent in Nevers. You'd think they were
written by a contemplative scholar.

 

[lifepsyop]

Yes. And that was a huge problem for his theory, which he couldn't explain. How did new traits not just get blended out of existence in the mass of other traits? Fortunately,l Mendel's discovery explained this; inheritance is not like mixing jelly; it's like sorting beads. And so Darwin's theory was saved when Mendel's work was rediscovered.

I know you're a big fan, but Darwin was not the be-all-end-all of evolutionary thought. If his view fell out of favor for whatever reason, there would be Lamarck or someone else to carry the ball forward. (actually Lamarck is making a bit of a comeback among evolutionary biologists these days and Darwin is not nearly as orthodox as he was the last century... the Darwinian model has actually caused some significant confusion in biology)


In keeping with the spirit of Gnosticism, at its core, Evolution is the idea of all of nature, including human nature, as being in a state of 'becoming'. The specific mode of 'becoming' does not matter so much. Darwin's grandfather Erasmus didn't know how animals evolved, but he knew they must have evolved because that was what the philosophy demands. The philosophy demands the rendering of all of history into a state of changing and unfolding nature, just as Lucretius opined over 2000 years ago.

The gnostic 'god' is the experience of gnosis; the enlightenment of man. And if God is to be found only within enlightened man's reason, then God must be stripped completely out of the state of nature.

This is how Gnosticism merges with Theistic Evolution, as a shared belief in 'becoming', where man rises up out of a primitive state of nature and through evolution experiences his apotheosis. As Neil deGrasse Tyson would say, man realizes he is stardust, he realizes and reflects on his own state of nature and in so doing transcends his nature. The theistic evolutionist says the evolved man is given a soul. The gnostic says the evolved man is given the capacity for his enlightenment. Then God is not found through the revelation of his works on the earth, the revelation of holy scripture, but only through the mind of man.

In both accounts, (Gnosticism and Theistic Evolution) the universal state of nature is completely sterilized of God's presence. (God doesn't come down on mountains and cause earthquakes, God doesn't march around the desert as a pillar of cloud and fire) ...these are only myths of pre-enlightened man who has yet to learn that God is found only through personal Gnosis. Both the Gnostic and the Theistic Evolutionist look down on what they perceive as the childish idea that the accounts of Israel in the Bible might actually be true.

 

[The Barbarian]

I know you're a big fan, but Darwin was not the be-all-end-all of evolutionary thought.

I just showed you that he wasn't, and gave an example. Are you reading any of this?

If his view fell out of favor for whatever reason, there would be Lamarck or someone else to carry the ball forward.

Genetics was just the first of several major revisions to Darwinian theory. And as I showed you, scientists before Darwin has figured out that some kind of evolution must have occured. Darwin's great discovery was how it works.

Darwin's grandfather Erasmus didn't know how animals evolved,

But Darwin figured it out. It's why he gets the credit.

In keeping with the spirit of Gnosticism, at its core, Evolution is the idea of all of nature, including human nature, as being in a state of 'becoming'.

That's not what gnosticism is.

a prominent heretical movement of the 2nd-century Christian Church, partly of pre-Christian origin. Gnostic doctrine taught that the world was created and ruled by a lesser divinity, the demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being, esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of whom enabled the redemption of the human spirit.
gnosticism - Google Search

You've been badly misled there. This is how gnosticism merges with YE creationism; a retreat from orthodox Christianity and new doctrines personally arrived by by revision of scripture. As you learned earlier, creationists who lean to ID tend to become deists. More "traditional" YE creationist invent new doctrines as the gnostics did.

 

[lifepsyop]

I just showed you that he wasn't, and gave an example. Are you reading any of this?

Yes I am, and you continuously assert that Darwin (or Neo-Darwinism) is the only legitimate context in which to discuss Evolution, and that Evolution in any other context is some kind of YE word trickery. (e.g. raising the fact of modern science's orthodox belief in the evolution of the whole universe)

Genetics was just the first of several major revisions to Darwinian theory. And as I showed you, scientists before Darwin has figured out that some kind of evolution must have occured. Darwin's great discovery was how it works.

Ah yes, the 'great discovery' of the 19th century: "That which survives, survives."

Darwin provided a tautology that basically said so little, that it couldn't be disproven. Who is going to argue that animals which don't get eaten have a better chance of reproducing? Who is going to be able to prove or disprove that environmental conditions produce the necessary selection pressures to induce the metamorphoses of strikingly unique lifeforms over millions of years? The strength of the proposed Darwinian mechanism is a cloud of speculation.

One of the major confusions that Darwinism entered into the life sciences is the widespread idea that all biological change observed is by default a Darwinian mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutations. What closer examinations have begun to reveal more and more is that the environment appears to have a remarkable effect on directly inducing changes in the physiology of animals. One of the giveaways is that it seems to happen rather quickly, even within individual lifespans... faster than the time that would be needed for the workmill of selection and mutation. Thus, the resurgence in Lamarckian evolutionary theory.

That's not what gnosticism is.

a prominent heretical movement of the 2nd-century Christian Church, partly of pre-Christian origin. Gnostic doctrine taught that the world was created and ruled by a lesser divinity, the demiurge, and that Christ was an emissary of the remote supreme divine being, esoteric knowledge (gnosis) of whom enabled the redemption of the human spirit.
gnosticism - Google Search

If you read a little more carefully, I wasn't saying what gnosticism is but what gnosticism has in common with evolutionism.

The parallel is the view of history as the progression of man evolving out of a state of primitive nature and acquiring divine union through philosophical enlightenment.

Even the atheistic materialist has a kind of personal 'gnosis' with the perceived reveleation that he is the stardust of the universe that has become aware of itself. Theistic evolutionists believe that man was enlightened to the true reality of God through 'science', which revealed a deistic type of god that wound up the clock of nature, stepped back, and let it unwind until it evolved man in order that he might become enlightened of the nature of the deity.

Whether it's the classical gnostic Monad, God the Father, or man's Enlightenment or Gnosis itself, Both the evolutionist and the gnostic need the true god to be something beyond the state of nature, and since history itself is a gradual 'Becoming' towards this event of man's enlightened knowledge of the god behind nature itself, he must reject the notion of God working directly in history (e.g. sending plagues on Egypt and bringing out the nation of Israel)

Likewise, both the gnostic and the theistic evolutionist cast the creation of the natural world as a kind of material prison of death and decay, that this state of nature was directly associated with the creation itself. The main difference here is that the gnostic believes the creator of the world to be a malevolent or incompetent demiurge, and the theistic evolutionist simply accepts the deathly state of nature as how the deity intended to create the world.

 

[The Barbarian]

Yes I am, and you continuously assert that Darwin (or Neo-Darwinism) is the only legitimate context in which to discuss Evolution

I said that? (Barbarian checks) No, turns out, I didn't. You perhaps mistook me for someone else?

Neutralist theories aren't Darwinian, but they've added considerably to modern evolutionary theory. While Darwin did show how natural selection can produce stasis, the theory of punctuated equilibrium is not part of Darwin's theory. Also, Darwin, like most of his contemporary scientists, thought that acquired characteristics might be inherited, which is mostly untrue, with the "kinda sorta" exception of epigenetics.
Which is also not Darwinian.

It is true that the four points of Darwinian theory remain true and repeatedly verified, but there's a lot more to evolutrionary theory than Darwin proposed.

If you read a little more carefully, I wasn't saying what gnosticism is but what gnosticism has in common with evolutionism.

I read it, but as you see, that's not what gnosticism is about. Ironically, gnosticism fits creationist beliefs much more closely than it fits science. It supposes the world and the organisms in it were poofed into existence miraculously by a deity not capable of creating an entire universe that unfolds as an omnipotent Creator would do.

The Creator of the universe is much wiser more powerful than creationists would like Him to be. Hence, the attribution of demiurge behavior to God by creationists.

The main difference here is that the gnostic believes the creator of the world to be a malevolent or incompetent demiurge, and the creationist simply accepts that it's a good thing.

 

[The Barbarian]

Ah yes, the 'great discovery' of the 19th century: "That which survives, survives."

No. It's amusing that almost everyone who reads Darwin's four points can understand it but YE creationists can't understand it.

Darwin provided a tautology that basically said so little, that it couldn't be disproven.

You already forgot what I showed you? As you learned, Darwin's four points have been repeatedly tested and verified. So much so, that many creationist organizations now admit that speciation is a fact, and that natural selection is the reason.

Theistic evolutionists believe that man was enlightened to the true reality of God through 'science',

All the thestic evolutionists I know, think that inspiration from God is the way people learn about Him. You were really misled there.

which revealed a deistic type of god that wound up the clock of nature, stepped back, and let it unwind until it evolved man in order that he might become enlightened of the nature of the deity.

Nope. You've confused ID creationism with Christianity. Theistic evolutionists generally believe that God remains intimately involved with every aspect of our universe. IDers and their creationist allies tend to drift off toward deism, saying that maybe the "designer" is a "space alien."

 

[lifepsyop]

It is true that the four points of Darwinian theory remain true and repeatedly verified, but there's a lot more to evolutrionary theory than Darwin proposed.

Darwin's four points sound a lot to me like "That which survives, survives."

I read it, but as you see, that's not what gnosticism is about. Ironically, gnosticism fits creationist beliefs much more closely than it fits science. It supposes the world and the organisms in it were poofed into existence miraculously by a deity not capable of creating an entire universe that unfolds as an omnipotent Creator would do.

Gnosticism is compatible with creationism generally speaking but could not be more opposed to the Biblical worldview that the original creation of the world and people was very good.
Gnosticism sees nature and physicality as an inherently corrupt thing to be transcended through the power of enlightenment or gnosis. Evolution shares largely the same metaphysical frame of reference, with humanity's evolved powers of reasoning transcending the primordial state of nature, the stardust becoming aware of itself.

You attempt to avoid this problem by claiming the original creation (according to theistic evolution) of violence and death and decay was very good. It's the same material realm designed as a prison of suffering as the classic gnostic would teach. Evolution is like Gnosticism where the demiurge has been converted into nature itself. The evolutionist has transcended the demiurge(his natural ignorant state) through scientific gnosis, in which he locates the 'god of nature' through his enlightened sense of reason.

But the Bible teaches that the original creation that man lived in with God was very good, not an evolutionary wasteland of death and disease.

 

[The Barbarian]

Darwin's four points sound a lot to me like "That which survives, survives."

If it does, we have a reading dificulty.

Gnosticism is compatible with creationism generally speaking but could not be more opposed to the Biblical worldview that the original creation of the world and people was very good.

That is what the gnostics say. They say it was very good, because the demiurge could not do anything perfect.

Gnosticism sees nature and physicality as an inherently corrupt thing to be transcended through the power of enlightenment or gnosis.

Kinda like YE creationism. Creationism shares largely the same metaphysical frame of reference, with a supposed imperfect world from which man must transcend the primordial state of nature,

As you have seen, evolutionary theory has no such supernatural assumptions. It's a creationist/gnostic thing.

 

[The Barbarian]

You attempt to avoid this problem by claiming the original creation (according to theistic evolution) of violence and death and decay was very good.

It's normal for natural man to fear death. Until Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they had no reason to fear it. And after Jesus died for us, we now have no reason to fear it. Physical death is not the enemy; we have to experience it, but it has no hold on us. There's nothing evil in it.

The fear of death and repulsion against His world, is found only in those who have not accepted His grace.

 

[mindlight]

Gnosticism believes that the natural world is something fully separate from the spiritual realm of God.

Gnosticism shuttles divinity off to a realm far away from the natural creation. The creation is necessarily something locked or imprisoned within a certain system of physical laws. Creatures of the world are necessarily a product of this universal system of nature. Evolution is the generation of the diversity of living things according to the universal motivations of nature... e.g. enviromentally induced selection pressures.

So creatures are a result of natural process, the metamorphic procession of the universal material substance through time.

The gnostic mind sees the true spiritual world as something far beyond the material world. The material world is something lesser and brutish, governed by death and decay. And the gnostic finds "God" as a source so far beyond the material realm that this god would not even dirty his hands working with it. The gnostic journey is a transcendance from the realm of physical bodies, and a return to this divine ethereal source of all things, a return to oneness and divine illumination.

The pathway towards this illumination is through gnosis, not through primitive superstitious stories and mythologies, but through the power of human reason which is the one element found in nature that can actually transcend nature.

Gnostics wish to fully separate the realm of the material and spiritual. The material is something rough and degenerate, while the spiritual is something sophisticated and refined and true. The rough stone versus the refined block with perfect angles and measurements. The material world is the dark shadow cast on the wall, while the spiritual world is the illuminating sunlight above.

To have the divine spiritual realm intruding into the material creation in such primitive ways as sculpting people and animals out of the dust of the earth, or getting angry and dumping water over everything and flooding the earth, or marching around the desert in a pillar of cloud... these are seen as primitive folk mythologies using the familiarity of human activity in an attempt to reveal the mystery of the divine... the real "God" would never involve himself in such 'human' ways... these are only parables and moral lessons, mysteries that reveal some sophisticated truth about the divine reality.

The gnostic sees his way of interpretation scripture as far more sophisticated, and looks down on what he sees as a silly and ignorant way of interpreting events in scripture as actual history. This is the primary reason that Biblical historicity is attacked with such fervor... it knocks man off his philosophical high horse. The repeated claim of scientific evidence is a kind of smokescreen to divert people away from what is fundamentally a philosophical disagreement with no power of evidence. It always goes back to a root assumption of philosophical naturalism.

In the same manner, the gnostic will also 'de-materialize' his eschatology, where visions of an actual New Jerusalem city descending from heaven, or of an actual second-coming of the King of Kings with his army of angels to wage war on the rebellious nations... these are likewise viewed as mere symbolism for a divine transformation that is far above the dealings of physical bodies on the earth. The afterlife is seen as something immaterial and ethereal, not a place of physical human bodies and inhabitable cities.

The gnostic Jesus is an ambiguous one, at times nothing more than a teacher of self-enlightenment, or a symbolic 'gnosis'. When the gnostic Jesus speaks about events recorded in scripture, it is always meant to be metaphors and parables, never referring to real events in the material world.

So the fixation on 'naturalizing' everything is a way of fortifying this gnostic belief system. There is the creation of nature itself, which the gnostic admits must have originated from somewhere beyond nature, "God"... however once the rought material state of nature is created, it becomes something impure and unclean that "God" is too far above to be interacting with the way a mere lesser man would interact with a lump of clay.

So this kind of thinking leads to the popularization of Theistic-Evolution, which ultimately becomes a belief in materialistic evolution of the entire universe, the universe as one big alchemical refinery, which is the foundation of modern science and the modern world.

I guess Theistic evolutionists do separate the material and spiritual worlds ignoring the influence of the latter. But they are not Gnostics in the strictest sense lacking faith in Demi Urges and a horror of the physical world as somehow spoiled. Also, their reflections are based on a celebration of and fascination with the physical world over a literal interpretation of what God has said. Theistic Evolutionists are more Deistic with occasional Divine interventions in some versions.

 

[lifepsyop]

I guess Theistic evolutionists do separate the material and spiritual worlds ignoring the influence of the latter. But they are not Gnostics in the strictest sense lacking faith in Demi Urges and a horror of the physical world as somehow spoiled. Also, their reflections are based on a celebration of and fascination with the physical world over a literal interpretation of what God has said. Theistic Evolutionists are more Deistic with occasional Divine interventions in some versions.

Not Gnostics 'in the strictest sense', but by that logic not Christians either, because all the Christians of the first few centuries AD were creationists as well. What seems to have happened is that both Gnostic and Christian thinkers followed the same philosophical threads to shuttle God to a realm strictly outside of nature. Gnostics no longer required a Demiurge character, because nature itself became the demiurge of ignorance, acted out in a primitive world before gnosis occurred in the minds of men.

The central gnostic element is the view of humanity and world history as being within a state of a transformative "becoming"... a belief in the universe unfolding in a rational way, according to human reason. Humans are conceptualized as the substance of the universe becoming aware of itself. This is the core spiritual thrust of the humanistic modern period, 16th-19th centuries.

Modern science is based on this philosophical revolution in the minds of men. Modern science is not merely a method but a philosophical shift from the recognition of an order of being outside of or above nature, to a system of knowledge about the universe based only on how man could conceive of it in a rational way. Approaching reality in a strictly empirical and rational way means you are going to interpret the history of the universe as a dialectic materialistic process... or the continual "becoming" of a transforming nature.

This type of 'science' is the essence of gnosticism, and it's where we get our one-dimensional evolutionary interpretation of reality. A gnostic thinker views enlightenment as a progressive transformation from darkness and ignorance to a state of illuminated reason... he dispels the tricks and illusions of nature with the powers of reasoning in order to transcend the state of nature (stardust becomes aware of itself) ... and so this same idea of rational progress is projected onto the nature of reality itself, and the end result is the belief that everything must have evolved.

God is not supposed to be found interacting in the state of nature, (e.g. traveling around the middle-eastern wilderness in a pillar of cloud) because gnosticism identified the true god with his rational awakening to reality itself. The idea of scientific enlightenment is considered to be that rational awakening to the true reality behind our illusions about the earth being 'poofed into existence' by God.

So in the theistic evolutionist's worldview, world history is this same type of process of human development from primitive material roots up to the acquisition of scientific enlightenment, when humanity dispels ancient ignorance and acquires a divine gnosis into the true nature of reality.

This is also the basic philosophical Enlightenment narrative of "science" being a new system of actual knowledge that reveals special truth about reality that was previously hidden. "science" here is a code word for Gnosis. It is not simply a methodology, but a real belief that the fundamental nature of reality has been unveiled through the illumination of man.

But this belief is itself based on a kind of circular argument that the rational and naturalistic interpretation of the universe must be the most correct one. This is the assumption that is not to be questioned, and we are simply told that explanations which only include 'natural causes' are axiomatically the best ones. Modern science is based on a philosophical system that strips the idea of an immanent God out of reality and forbids the questioning of it.

That is why people believed in evolution long before there was any real scientific theories for evolution. The belief in evolution was a consequence of the humanistic gnostic philosophy of a progressive human nature, ascending towards enlightenment. The scientific theories that came along later were just attempts to figure out how everything evolved rationalistically, but these theories were all based on a mode of thinking that was incapable of questioning whether or not a rationalistic evolutionary process actually occurred.

Long before Darwinism, the conclusion of Evolution was already baked into the cake. And today everyone is very familiar with that feeling that one is not allowed to "question the science"... It's that essential forbidden-ness that usually accompanies a religion.

 

[The Barbarian]

Here's an interview with a scientist who is a Christian, regarding how faith in God is consistent with evolution.
The ’Evidence for Belief’: An Interview with Francis Collins

Quite a contrast with the Diestic/Gnostic philosophy of many creationists.