Where Did Humans Come From?

Confused-by-christianity said:

Maybe that's what the fruit on the tree in the garden means? A moral awakening that leads to lots of errors and poor decisions but in return, we get to know and love god. ?????

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I think you are right about this.

Confused-by-christianity said:

God made everything. Plants, into animals, into an animal that can make a moral freewill decision (rather than just follow instinct). Once a moral decision is made, the animal is capable of worshipping god - choosing to love god (human). If it can choose to love god, it can understand being loved by god. this opens the siritual world up.

Maybe that's what the fruit on the tree in the garden means? A moral awakening that leads to lots of errors and poor decisions but in return, we get to know and love god. ?????

?????

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There is no "made plants into animals" and there is no "made animals into humans" in Genesis 1 or 2. Rather from the dust of the ground God made humans.

The tree and the garden were literal - Adam and Eve actually were created perfect/sinless and actually did fall - and then literally took on a sinful nature.

The act of "rebellion" is what made the fruit of the forbidden tree sinful for "sin IS transgression of the law" 1 John 3:4

nothing obscure about it.

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It is one thing to point out that dragon's in space in Rev 12 is a clear symbol - it is another to claim that trees with fruit and real people eating them "could not possibly be literal" -- that is an extreme.

BobRyan said:

There is no "made plants into animals" and there is no "made animals into humans" in Genesis 1 or 2. Rather from the dust of the ground God made humans.
The tree and the garden were literal - Adam and Eve actually were created perfect/sinless and actually did fall - and then literally took on a sinful nature.
The act of "rebellion" is what made the fruit of the forbidden tree sinful for "sin IS transgression of the law" 1 John 3:4
nothing obscure about it.
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It is one thing to point out that dragon's in space in Rev 12 is a clear symbol - it is another to claim that trees with fruit and real people eating them "could not possibly be literal" -- that is an extreme.

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Thanks for sharing your opinion

We both think pretty different things happened - but I guess that's part of being human - not really knowing and doing the best you can to explain. Sharing what you come up with.

DialecticSkeptic said:

, bacteria are single-celled life. The atoms of which it is composed are not alive, nor are their electrons, nor the cytoplasmic membrane with its glycoproteins, filaments, phospholipid bilayer and such, the polyhedral protein shells and their enzymes, the flagellum, and so on—but all of it together constitutes living bacteria. Life emerges from constituent matter that is not itself alive. It's definitely mysterious, but as a religious person I am comfortable with mystery. I have no idea how all these things which aren't alive constitute something that is itself alive, but they do. .

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Life does not emerge from non-life. It only emerges from life.

By contrast living things are composed of basic elements where are not themselves alive.

IN Gen 2 God "forms man from the dust" -- so there we have infinite God + non-life (dust) is able to "create" life, a "living being".

That is very different from the idea that dust does that by itself or the idea that non-God can take a chemistry set and come up with life.

Confused-by-christianity said:

Thanks for sharing your opinion

We both think pretty different things happened - but I guess that's part of being human - not really knowing and doing the best you can to explain. Sharing what you come up with.

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It is down to what the text actually says... and on that point the text is so blatant that even the non-Christian scholars of OT studies and Hebrew in all world class universities agree - the text is saying exactly what I stated. They may not choose to "believe the text" but that is very different from not knowing what the text is actually teaching/saying.

=== reference

Professor James Barr, Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford, has written:
The idea that the text itself is so poorly constructed or difficult to read that any view of it is possible - does not hold up to the objective reality of the case. Here even the non-Christian experts clearly see what the text is saying -- even though they don't choose to believe the author of it.

BobRyan said:

It is down to what the text actually says... and on that point the text is so blatant that even the non-Christian scholars of OT studies and Hebrew in all world class universities agree - the text is saying exactly what I stated. They may not choose to "believe the text" but that is very different from not knowing what the text is actually teaching/saying.

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I often think this too. That the authors are just recording what they really believe. I don't assume they were correct about everything. They may have been telling the truth as they saw it.

Of course - they weren't great scientists.

I find the scriptures have really valueable spiritual truths, even in spite of the scientific inaccuracies, even in spite of the moral deficiencies of some of the characters.

Perhaps there is real value in religious / spiritual experience - and when people tell their experiences of god, we all gain from it.???
Perhaps there are spiritual beings weaving spiritual truths into our scripture stories. Perhaps those truths resonate with us at a deep level but not an entirely conscious one.?????

I don't know.
In part, I guess ..
thats how I find value and purpose in the bible.
I never assumed I would have to have identical beliefs as the authors to gain spiritually from reading the bible.

For you personally - When the bible says stuff like "God made the earth in 6 days", do you read that as though God himself is saying it??

The Barbarian said:

I think you are right about this.

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It seems to point towards an awakening of some sort.

I'm interested in knowing how the author got inspired to tell the story.

Was it an angel or a vision? some other mystical experience?

BobRyan said:

Your complaint "is WITH the text" as has been shown repeatedly.

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Can anyone make sense of Bob's words? The text says that God became a man - a bipedal rational-souled mammal endued with the same kind of physiology, anatomy, psychology, weaknesses, conscience, intelligence, and overall image as the man Adam.

Where do the words "Hypostatic Union" appear in Scripture?
Where do the words "two self-contradictory natures" appear in Scripture?

They don't - it's a logical construct brainwashed/indoctrinated into us for 2,000 years by theologians immersed in Plato's Greek philosophy.

This is beginning to look like intellectual dishonesty. You have shown NO BIBLICAL PROOF whatsoever of your position and yet keep insisting to the contrary. And no resolution of the problems raised at posts such as 376 and 411.

Again you admit you object to the text....

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Intellectual dishonesty. Which verse did I object to? Having a different interpretation than you isn't necessarily a rejection of the text. Are you infallible?

...and at the same time admit that the nature of infinite God is incomprehensible to finite human. Am I suppose to object to that?

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Intellectual dishonesty. That's not an admission/concession on my part. It's an objection. I reject any incoherent claim if a coherent one is available, especially if the incoherent claim seems rife with contradictions. Here's an example (and I can provide several more).

Can an infinitely powerful God crave more power? The obvious answer is No. By that same token, can an infinitely self-sufficient God suffer ANY kind of craving - unfulfilled wants, desires, needs? The obvious answer is No. Therefore it would be impossible for Him to WANT to create this world for His good pleasure.

What I object to - is making stuff up then arguing that some guy in the 13th century made something up so it must be ok for you to do it as well.

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What are you talking about? 13th century? You think the Hypostatic Union began in the 13th century? It was there at least midway through the fifth century. And you seem to be backpedaling again because, when I asked if you think Thomas Aquinas later misread the doctrine in the 13th century, you seemed to acknowledge that such is a bogus claim.

On top of that, I pointed you to a website staffed by Catholic Answers declaring that the Hypostatic Union (a created human soul in Christ) is STILL the official position of the church. Even though I myself have no need for such a doctrine.

You have free will and can make stuff up if you like - but it is not a compelling form of argument. As for the two natures of the incarnate Christ - well there is a few billion christians on planet earth that agree with me and apparently you as well -- that this is what the Bible teaches.

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Agree with you? I don't agree with incoherent claims. You might as well speak Chinese to me.

The 2-natured theory asserts that the incarnate Christ was both ignorant and omniscient simultaneously. I illustrated the claim at 376 like so:
....(A) My friend Mike is a math genius. Ask him any math question, he will tell you the answer.
.....(B) He also has a second nature, an ignorant one. Ask him any math question, he CANNOT tell you the answer.

I made it VERY CLEAR that I cannot assent to a claim that I do not understand. For you to say that I did is more intellectual dishonesty on your part.

In my view, the enthroned Son remained omniscient (not in an infinite sense). The incarnate Christ was a TOTALLY SEPARATE piece of Him fully regressed unto ignorance for the duration of the Incarnation. NEITHER party was both ignorant and omniscient at the same time.

@BobRyan,

You've been laughably insinuating that 13th-century Thomas Aquinas misunderstood the Hypostatic Union formulated at least by the 5th century, adding to it a created human soul.

You need to take a look at this heresy:
Apollinarism - Wikipedia

"Apollinarism was declared to be a heresy in 381 by the First Council of Constantinople."

Actually Apollinaris had several christological beliefs deemed heretical. The one at issue here, however, was the following. He claimed that Christ's inner man - the main part of it at least - was the divine Word (Logos) placed in his body. In other words, he didn't support the orthodox view of a fully created, fully human soul/spirit within Christ. The church condemned his position as heresy.

FaithT said:

Some would insist that that God made man fully human from the start.

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Haha maybe He did.

I heard something somewhere,
“Don’t crush your childrens ideals if they are incorrect, let them grow”.

I think it means something like … Santa Claus might bring a lot of joy to a child’s heart that will eventually grow into joy as an adult at Christmas - bringing everyone joy. Eventually the belief in Santa will disappear, but it was the building blocks of joy.

my point is, if someone reads the bible and come up with a belief that’s incorrect - in their own good time they will grow above it. (If I’m wrong - I’ll be the one growing above it).

JAL said:

We see it all the time? Dead particles coming alive? That claim doesn't make sense to me.

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It's also not what I said.

JAL said:

ALL living things—yes, even plants and bacteria—have innate life (sentience). Regular protoplasm is not sentient—or is rather negligibly so, in my view—hence, this innate life MUST be a God-given soul.

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Okay, hit the brakes.

(1) All living things have innate life (sentience).
(2) Innate life = soul ("this innate life must be a God-given soul").
(3) Ergo, all living things have souls—including single-celled bacteria.

Is that what you are saying?

That's wild, man. Really out there.

P.S. That is a curious expression, "innate life (sentience)." It suggests that "sentience" and "innate life" are interchangeable terms. Are they? If not, then please clarify.

But if so, then you might have contradicted yourself. You said bacteria "have innate life," which you contradicted by saying that "protoplasm is not [alive]." (Wikipedia describes protoplasm as "the living part of the cell," so your claim that it's not alive is confounding.) Now, you could rehabilitate your claim by highlighting the word "negligibly," but if something is negligibly alive then it is alive.

JAL said:

This conclusion is not unreasonable, it's just that I can't seem to get there from dead particles. I don't care how you assemble them or "holistically" examine them, it's still just a bunch of dead particles, in my view.

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But you do get there—and you just proved it, above.

Again, look at a single-celled bacterium. The atoms of which it is composed are not alive, right? Glycoproteins are not alive, correct? Plasmids are not alive? Ribosomes, fimbria, polysaccharides, etc., are not alive? And yet, as you just admitted above, bacteria are alive. So, how do we get a living thing from a bunch of stuff that is not alive?

Or maybe you believe things like plasmids ARE alive, in which case we would need to closely examine your definition of "life" and explore its ramifications.

JAL said:

Now, if you reassured me that all these particles are sentient/alive from the getgo, then you and I would have more in common.

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Would we have more in common because you actually do believe plasmids are alive?

Also: Do you believe "sentient" and "alive" mean the same thing? The dictionary disagrees, so am I missing something here?

BobRyan said:

... living things are composed of basic elements [which] are not themselves alive.

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If none of the basic elements have life, and yet the organism they compose has life, then we have life from non-life.

Again, "Life emerges from constituent matter that is not itself alive"—which is what you just said, too.

BobRyan said:

In Genesis 2, God forms man "from the dust." So, there we have infinite God plus dust (non-life) is able to create life, a "living being."

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As a Christian I would agree, obviously, that God can create life from non-life. However, I don't think we're supposed to understand "dust" in a literal sense because each and every one of us is formed by God from dust (Psalm 103:14; 1 Corinthians 15:48; etc.). That account is not describing an anthropology for Adam that is different from us but rather the same as us. We are all made of dust—but not literally. It is theological language, not biological. The only difference between Adam and everyone else is that he was the federal head of the old humanity in covenant relation to God (whereas Jesus Christ, the last Adam, is the federal head of the new humanity in covenant relation to God). Adam was made of dust by God; so are we. He was made in the image of God; so are we.

BobRyan said:

That is very different from the idea that dust does that by itself ...

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We're both Christians. Neither one of us believes that.

BobRyan said:

... or the idea that non-God can take a chemistry set and come up with life.

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We have done that.

DialecticSkeptic said:

It's also not what I said.

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Ok, I'm misreading you then. Sorry about that, but I'm still not sure where I went wrong.

Okay, hit the brakes.

(1) All living things have innate life (sentience).
(2) Innate life = soul ("this innate life must be a God-given soul").
(3) Ergo, all living things have souls—including single-celled bacteria.

Is that what you are saying?

That's wild, man. Really out there.

P.S. That is a curious expression, "innate life (sentience)." It suggests that "sentience" and "innate life" are interchangeable terms. Are they? If not, then please clarify.

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Yes. My monistic materialism regards all matter as alive/sentient. All the matter constituting the created universe (aside from the portion set aside by God to function as souls) is negligibly alive/sentient (for all practical purposes it is dead). Our bodies are thus dead (negligibly sentient). However, God has mated a material soul to our material body. THAT soul is fully sentient.

Sentience is in degrees. Anything classified by biologists as life/living, in my view, probably has a soul (assuming that biologists are competent). Simple organisms, in my view, are BARELY sentient because their bodies, for lack of a brain or sufficiently sophisticated nervous system, are not conducive to helping their soul flow its thought-currents in rich thought-patterns. A simple organism, then, is almost as dead as a rock, so dead that we might almost want to classify the simple organism as negligibly sentient.

Sorry I seem to lack the eloquence to articulate these distinctions as clearly as I'd like.

But if so, then you might have contradicted yourself. You said bacteria "have innate life," which you contradicted by saying that "protoplasm is not [alive]." (Wikipedia describes protoplasm as "the living part of the cell," so your claim that it's not alive is confounding.) Now, you could rehabilitate your claim by highlighting the word "negligibly," but if something is negligibly alive then it is alive.

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It's a matter of perspective. Is my body alive or dead? Yes and No, right? The soul is a living entity merged to every cell (albeit divinely hidden from human instruments of detection). The soul provides animation to every cell. I gave an example: I said the soul, by free will, pushes/pulls/drags/moves the body. The protoplasm LEFT ON ITS OWN would be dead (negligibly sentient), but it has the APPEARANCE of life - it exhibits the OUTWARD BEHAVIOR of life - due to the soul's animating activity. To summarize my view: a living soul animates (pushes/pulls/drags) a dead body (a negligibly sentient body).

But you do get there—and you just proved it, above.

Again, look at a single-celled bacterium. The atoms of which it is composed are not alive, right? Glycoproteins are not alive, correct? Plasmids are not alive? Ribosomes, fimbria, polysaccharides, etc., are not alive? And yet, as you just admitted above, bacteria are alive. So, how do we get a living thing from a bunch of stuff that is not alive?

Or maybe you believe things like plasmids ARE alive, in which case we would need to closely examine your definition of "life" and explore its ramifications.

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Life exists where God has chosen to place a soul. He has opted to do this for select arrangements of matter that we call "species". When He sees a human zygote in a womb, for example, He immediately places a soul there. In fact the sperm and egg itself might already have a soul, for all I know.

Would we have more in common because you actually do believe plasmids are alive?

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They are alive if they have a soul. Otherwise they are dead (negligibly sentient).

Also: Do you believe "sentient" and "alive" mean the same thing? The dictionary disagrees, so am I missing something here?

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Yes. I don't believe that the term "alive" has any valuable meaning unless it refers to at least a primordial sentience.

Suppose I'm wrong that bacteria have souls. Maybe they are just machines (negligibly sentient particles). In that case, I would say that biologists are in error as well - they should not refer to a machine as life/living.

So, there is a margin of possible error in classifying something as alive/sentient. But that doesn't really impact my views in any significant way.

@BobRyan,

At post 408, I explained the Incarnation. At post 428, I reaffirmed that PART of the Son became ignorant/incarnate. No simultaneity of omniscience and ignorance in either part.

Was such a solution available to traditional theologians? No because, even today, they still hold to DDS (Doctrine of Divine Simplicity) - the doctrine that God is not divisible into parts. The roots of this doctrine can be found in Plato's Greek philosophy.

Thus for traditionalists, God is only one indivisible part, both ignorant and omniscient during the Incarnation. Chafer accepted all this but acknowledged the incomprehensibility/incoherence: "How could He know and not know?…These are problems the finite mind cannot solve” (Lewis Sperry Chafer, “Trinitarianism Part 7,” Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol 98:391 (1941), p. 278).

Obviously indivisibility also makes the Trinity incomprehensible/incoherent. Erickson admitted that the orthodox Trinity is logically "absurd from the human standpoint" (Millard J. Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2001, reprint), p. 367).

FaithT said:

What is your theory as to how man came to be? And what’s your opinion on my OP?

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I believe God formed everything ex nihilo and directs and sustains His creation. This goes back billions of years and has resulted in at least one planet with abundant life. Life evolved, using finally semi conservative DNA replication that resulted in invertebrates, finally vertebrates, finally mammals, finally primates, finally humans. God ensouls all life with appropriate kinds of souls so finally the right kind of primates got human souls. This Adam and Eve.

I think your OP is a great exploration of faith and science, and how the two can be reconciled or considered in opposition. I don’t think science is automatically right but I don’t think good theology conflicts with good science. Conflict indicates a methodological problem in either the science or the theology.

BobRyan said:

But the reason is that God condemns it and that it results in harm to the gene pool, harm to children.

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Yes, but we are talking of the time before God decided that close family marriage should be stopped. God blessed them and told them to multiply it wasn't incest. The word incest itself comes from Latin which wasn't until after Christ.

FaithT said:

I think that that’s what I believe too, but I’m so confused after reading Answers in Genesis, other sites, and talking with my pastor.

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A well wishing evangelical in-law got me a subscription to Answers in Genesis. So for a year I read it. It was a mix of fact and ‘hypothesis’. Not that what passes for real science isn’t the same but good science can separate out hypothesis from fact. I have on rare occasions observed and even participated in good science. I didn’t find AIG to be that even though they obviously tried mightily. Kind of like a lot of science popularizers that really don’t get the story they are trying to tell who nonetheless tell us how revolutionary some discovery is.

There should not be a conflict between science and faith. Even Francis Schaeffer made that point in his book ‘No Final Conflict’. It’s complicated stuff. What I like about the Catholic position is the freedom to be a creationist or (within some bounds) an evolutionist. I have to respect others of either view while waiting for the Church to perhaps some day weigh in one way or the other. We are not irrevocably evolutionists but for me as an evolutionist (within certain bounds) it fits me while I await my final homecoming where it all gets explained. I can marvel at how wonderfully we are made and then I will see even more.