What Makes us Human?

[Notedstrangeperson]

I am a theistic evolutionist - although I believe we evolved from ape-like ancesors, I also believe humans to be above nature and evolution.
I believe that what makes us human is our "plastic brain":
Neuroplasticity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Put bluntly (very blunty), having a 'plastic brain' means that our thoughts and actions physically change the way our brains work.
Having only recently heard of this myself, there are undoubtedly many questions that need to be answered.

What do other people think of this idea, or of what makes us human?

 

[Mallon]

What about bearing the image of God? Genesis makes that pretty clear.

And why do you think humans are "above evolution"?

 

[peace4ever]

I am a theistic evolutionist - although I believe we evolved from ape-like ancesors, I also believe humans to be above nature and evolution.
I believe that what makes us human is our "plastic brain":
Neuroplasticity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Put bluntly (very blunty), having a 'plastic brain' means that our thoughts and actions physically change the way our brains work.
Having only recently heard of this myself, there are undoubtedly many questions that need to be answered.

What do other people think of this idea, or of what makes us human?

Only an evolutionist would ask what a human is. All children can recognize the difference between animals and humans on sight. That's because in order to deny God, Darwin has tried to dupe the world into believing that animals can turn into people or breed people as descendants. So evolutionists try to make it possible for animals to breed humans descendants and are thus naturally, confused about the difference between humans and animals. So they don't know why one can't breed the other.

But since you don't know, then I'll cut you some slack. Unlike any animal, humans have the capacity to reason, form and understand abstract concepts and values higher than bodily gratification. They also look different than animals which is why, of course, even children can recognize humans on sight.

 

[Assyrian]

Only an evolutionist would ask what a human is.

Job 7:17 What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him,
Job 15:14 What is man, that he can be pure? Or he who is born of a woman, that he can be righteous?
Psalm 8:4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
Psalm 144:3 O LORD, what is man that you regard him, or the son of man that you think of him?

All children can recognize the difference between animals and humans on sight.

Maybe you need to be a bit older and wiser than a child to recognise we are animals too.
Eccles 3:18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.

 

[gluadys]

I am a theistic evolutionist - although I believe we evolved from ape-like ancesors, I also believe humans to be above nature and evolution.
I believe that what makes us human is our "plastic brain":
Neuroplasticity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Put bluntly (very blunty), having a 'plastic brain' means that our thoughts and actions physically change the way our brains work.
Having only recently heard of this myself, there are undoubtedly many questions that need to be answered.

What do other people think of this idea, or of what makes us human?

I see that a considerable amount of the research is done using monkeys. Would not neuroplasticity apply to any animal that learns?

It doesn't sound like a 'plastic brain' is uniquely human.

 

[peace4ever]

Job 7:17 What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him,
Job 15:14 What is man, that he can be pure? Or he who is born of a woman, that he can be righteous?
Psalm 8:4 what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
Psalm 144:3 O LORD, what is man that you regard him, or the son of man that you think of him?


Maybe you need to be a bit older and wiser than a child to recognise we are animals too.
Eccles 3:18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.

The verses in the psalms are talking about the significance of man, not trying to define him.

The verse in Ecclesiastes is explaining that when man does not use his ability to reason and understand the principles of God, then he is no better than animals. But since man has the capacity to do that unlike animals, then man is not an animal as Jude 10 confirms.

So it does not good to quote a God you don't believe because you've then defeated your whole point. That's why unbelievers always misunderstand verses.

But if you want to continue lying to your children that they are animals, namely apes (which scientists made up), then they can only act like animals which is happening to an increasing degree in today's society. The highest values of children are now bodily gratification. That's what the Darwin Delusion has done to society.

 

[adimus]

I believe that the "image of God" is a reference to man's spiritual nature alone.

God has no physical body and needs none, not getting into the incarnation of the Son here-for brevity's sake.

God is a Spirit. Mankind is a "living soul." Hebrew is "Chaya." It is slightly distinguished from animal life which is always called "nephesh" along with humans too if I am not mistaken. All biological life is spiritual and alive in a true sense. But Man is uniquely spiritual in contrast with all other known biological life.

And yes whales, dolphins, elephants and some primates display various sorts of what appears to be spirituality. But it is not honestly quite the same to the higher ways that humans are spiritual.

 

[peace4ever]

I believe that the "image of God" is a reference to man's spiritual nature alone.

God has no physical body and needs none, not getting into the incarnation of the Son here-for brevity's sake.

God is a Spirit. Mankind is a "living soul." Hebrew is "Chaya." It is slightly distinguished from animal life which is always called "nephesh" along with humans too if I am not mistaken. All biological life is spiritual and alive in a true sense. But Man is uniquely spiritual in contrast with all other known biological life.

And yes whales, dolphins, elephants and some primates display various sorts of what appears to be spirituality. But it is not honestly quite the same to the higher ways that humans are spiritual.

Sorry, but since man's "spiritual" nature only focuses on bodily gratifications and what suits his on desires like animals do, then man's nature is no better than an animal.

But since man was created to act on a higher level than animals, then that's what separates him from the animals. But he can only do that if he knows he was created separately from the animals by God who gives man the ability to understand higher values than animals and who has not given that ability to animals. But those who believe they were created from animals, can be no better than their creator; monkey see; monkey do.

And that's what Darwin has duped the world into believing. Pretty tragic. So Darwin's delusion that animals can breed human descendants is not only a blatant lie, it is the most destructive lie told in the last few centuries which is why it spawned Naziism which is the belief that man can kill off the weak like animals do.

 

[Mallon]

I believe that the "image of God" is a reference to man's spiritual nature alone.

As do I. We certainly couldn't have been made in His physical image, as "God is spirit" (John 4:24a). If we subscribe to God's omnipresence, then God can have no body.

 

[peace4ever]

I see that a considerable amount of the research is done using monkeys. Would not neuroplasticity apply to any animal that learns?

It doesn't sound like a 'plastic brain' is uniquely human.

Who's the proverbial "they"? Or don't you care who they are since you'll simply blindly believe them because they are brainwashing you that only they can think and the rest of the world cannot? I suspect so.

So, if you consider yourself a monkey, then I believe you. I'm a human so I'll use my reason when discussing issues, not losing my reason to have blind faith in fallible human beings.

 

[Assyrian]

The verses in the psalms are talking about the significance of man, not trying to define him.

They were still asking the same question you though only an evolutionist would ask. Maybe the bible is more open to people asking questions and studying the wonders of God's creation than you realise. As Solomon put it, Prov 25:2 It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out

The verse in Ecclesiastes is explaining that when man does not use his ability to reason and understand the principles of God, then he is no better than animals. But since man has the capacity to do that unlike animals, then man is not an animal as Jude 10 confirms.

That is certainly an implication of the passage, but it is not what the passage says. It says God is showing us we are animals. We are more than just animals, should be more than just animals anyway, but we still are animals.

So it does not good to quote a God you don't believe because you've then defeated your whole point. That's why unbelievers always misunderstand verses.

Yet you don't believe God when he tells you you are an animal.

But if you want to continue lying to your children that they are animals, namely apes (which scientists made up), then they can only act like animals which is happening to an increasing degree in today's society. The highest values of children are now bodily gratification. That's what the Darwin Delusion has done to society.

I think that may be wishful thinking on your part. People have been behaving like animals long before the Theory of Evolution was discovered, just look at the verse you quote in Jude. Scientists have been devoting their lives as passionately to discovering the nature of the universe after we leaned about evolution as they did before.

 

[peace4ever]

They were still asking the same question you though only an evolutionist would ask. Maybe the bible is more open to people asking questions and studying the wonders of God's creation than you realise. As Solomon put it, Prov 25:2 It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out


That is certainly an implication of the passage, but it is not what the passage says. It says God is showing us we are animals. We are more than just animals, should be more than just animals anyway, but we still are animals.


Yet you don't believe God when he tells you you are an animal.


I think that may be wishful thinking on your part. People have been behaving like animals long before the Theory of Evolution was discovered, just look at the verse you quote in Jude. Scientists have been devoting their lives as passionately to discovering the nature of the universe after we leaned about evolution as they did before.

Speak for yourself. If you say you're an animal, I believe you.

But since humans have also shown the capacity to rule the world, form complex analyses, understand concepts that no animal has, then humans do exist. They're just not evolutionists since evolutionists don't use reason and they say they're animals.

Evolution opposes reality at every turn. No creation can be superior to its creator. That's an irrevocable fact. What man creates, he can also destroy since his creation originated in the mind of its creator; man.

But evolution says the opposite; the creation is superior to the creator! Thus, the clay forms the potter, and we can come from inferior animals because an animal's creation can magically create genes that they don't possess!

Since that is impossible and reality doesn't work that way, that notion is not only imaginary, but delusional because it hasn't been witnessed nor observed in reality. But since evolutionists are unreasoning animals as they admit, then it's no surprise that they will make up illogical stories that don't happen in reality.

 

[Assyrian]

I believe that the "image of God" is a reference to man's spiritual nature alone.

God has no physical body and needs none, not getting into the incarnation of the Son here-for brevity's sake.

God is a Spirit. Mankind is a "living soul." Hebrew is "Chaya." It is slightly distinguished from animal life which is always called "nephesh" along with humans too if I am not mistaken. All biological life is spiritual and alive in a true sense. But Man is uniquely spiritual in contrast with all other known biological life.

And yes whales, dolphins, elephants and some primates display various sorts of what appears to be spirituality. But it is not honestly quite the same to the higher ways that humans are spiritual.

Actually the phrase used in Genesis describing Adam as a 'living soul' or 'living creature' uses both these terms, Adam is a nephesh chay, Gen 2:7 then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. But this is the same phrase used to describe all the animals Adam named in Gen 2:19 So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. Genesis describes Adam as an animal.

I think traditionally our bibles have tended to to translate nephesh as 'soul' when it refers to people, but 'life' or 'breath' when it refers to animals, chay is regularly translated as 'beast' when it is talking about animals, but when it is used to describe people it is translated 'living' or 'life'. So we end up thinking our bible are making a distinction between us and other animals that simply isn't there. Incidentally, in Ecclesiastes ruach, spirit, is used for both man and animals, though he does suggest our spirits may return to God when we die while animal spirits might not Eccles 3:21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?

 

[Assyrian]

Speak for yourself. If you say you're an animal, I believe you.

And if the bible tells you you are an animal?

But since humans have also shown the capacity to rule the world, form complex analyses, understand concepts that no animal has, then humans do exist. They're just not evolutionists since evolutionists don't use reason and they say they're animals.

Evolution opposes reality at every turn. No creation can be superior to its creator. That's an irrevocable fact. What man creates, he can also destroy since his creation originated in the mind of its creator; man.

But evolution says the opposite; the creation is superior to the creator! Thus, the clay forms the potter, and we can come from inferior animals because an animal's creation can magically create genes that they don't possess!

Since that is impossible and reality doesn't work that way, that notion is not only imaginary, but delusional because it hasn't been witnessed nor observed in reality. But since evolutionists are unreasoning animals as they admit, then it's no surprise that they will make up illogical stories that don't happen in reality.

Do you have any scriptural basis for your view life cannot develop and grow?

Gen 1:24 And God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures..." God did not have the same problem with the idea of the inanimate earth producing living creatures you have.

 

[peace4ever]

Do you have any scriptural basis for your view life cannot develop and grow?

The bible tells us that humans can learn, but it also tells us in Jude 10 that without God, humans are like unreasoning animals as those who oppose God show. Claiming that the clay forms the potter is one of the most unreasoning beliefs one can have.

But the truth never changes. Lies always do. When someone tells a lie, he has to tell a second, 3rd, 4th lie, etc. to explain the first lie until he has either contradicted the first lie or has forgotten what the first lie was!

That has already happened to evolutionists. Their contradictions have already been pointed out to them over and over again, but they keep making up new lies that keep contradicting the old ones. And since most evolutionists have forgotten what the first lie was; namely that humans evolved from monkeys or apes, then they keep changing the common ancestor to make it be whatever they want it to be which contradicts everything they once said. So evolution is nothing but a web of lies that evolutionists themselves ignore.

 

[Assyrian]

The bible tells us that humans can learn, but it also tells us in Jude 10 that without God, humans are like unreasoning animals as those who oppose God show.

And how does that tells us our ability to reason cannot have evolved?

Claiming that the clay forms the potter is one of the most unreasoning beliefs one can have.

Are you talking about the biblical metaphor of the potter and the clay, if so, the potter in the metaphor is God not man so it isn't really a biblical argument against evolution. If you are talking about human potters, then all we have is your claim we did not evolve and that life could not have arisen from abiogenesis, but it is just your opinion, not any kind of scriptural basis.

But the truth never changes. Lies always do. When someone tells a lie, he has to tell a second, 3rd, 4th lie, etc. to explain the first lie until he has either contradicted the first lie or has forgotten what the first lie was!

That has already happened to evolutionists. Their contradictions have already been pointed out to them over and over again, but they keep making up new lies that keep contradicting the old ones. And since most evolutionists have forgotten what the first lie was; namely that humans evolved from monkeys or apes, then they keep changing the common ancestor to make it be whatever they want it to be which contradicts everything they once said. So evolution is nothing but a web of lies that evolutionists themselves ignore.

Truth never changes, but our understanding of it certainly does. By your argument our scientific understanding of medicine, gravity, atoms and the motion of the planets are all lies because they have changed and devoloped over the centuries. The propblem is scripture interpretation has changed too. Christians once believed that the bible taught us the sun went round the earth. Now they don't, well most of them don't. Do we dismiss scripture as a lie because our understanding of it has developed and grown? You may not realise it, but creationism has changed too. If you want to have a look at some of the golden oldies that creationists have been abandoning check out Arguments we think creationists should NOT use

 

[mark kennedy]

I am a theistic evolutionist - although I believe we evolved from ape-like ancesors, I also believe humans to be above nature and evolution.
I believe that what makes us human is our "plastic brain":
Neuroplasticity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Put bluntly (very blunty), having a 'plastic brain' means that our thoughts and actions physically change the way our brains work.
Having only recently heard of this myself, there are undoubtedly many questions that need to be answered.

What do other people think of this idea, or of what makes us human?

Put bluntly, very bluntly, the genes involved in the development of the human brain are highly conserved and inheritable changes almost always result in disease and disorder.

Is the Human Brain a Null Hypothesis for Darwinism?

What makes us so different is that our brains are almost three times as big with a much more developed cerebral cortex. The oversimplification of this major difficulty for TOE with regards to human evolution is the stuff of myth and legend. Science follows with endless theories and speculations that never come close to a directly observed or demonstrated molecular mechanism for how our brains could have evolved from that of apes.

"The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite."...The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the general validity of all scientific method!. About this Einstein had said, "Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest," ... to Phædrus... To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science! Through...theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones...Scientifically produced antiscience...chaos. (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintanance)​

The fact is that a human/chimpanzee ancestor is a myth and the actual evidence demonstrates this, except the scientific and academic community refuses to stop their pagan mythography with regards to human origins.

 

[peace4ever]

And how does that tells us our ability to reason cannot have evolved?

What could happen is called science fiction. What does happen is called science. But the problem is, no creation can be superior to its creator. So humans could not have come from an inferior source since clay doesn't form the potter.

 

[Assyrian]

What could happen is called science fiction. What does happen is called science.

And you are claiming without any evidence it didn't happen because you think it 'could' not. Sounds like your idea of science fiction too.

But the problem is, no creation can be superior to its creator. So humans could not have come from an inferior source since clay doesn't form the potter.

I dealt with this before. You are still confusing creator with creation. Could I suggest you answer the points I made?

 

[peace4ever]

And you are claiming without any evidence it didn't happen because you think it 'could' not. Sounds like your idea of science fiction too.

I thought that science was based on observable phenomena, not imaginary scenarios. But it doesn't appear that what is considered scientific in this world doesn't differ from science fiction, does it?