How can you accept evolution and still have a spiritual reality, and/or a God faith

[Deeje]

Just to underline the differences in our approaches, 'John' as the (unknown) main author of the gospel of John, and John of Patmos, author of Revelation, are thought by modern scholarship to be different people. And ...

As I understand it, the Bible is the word of God, not the thoughts of the ones holding the pen. Whoever God chose to write down what he inspired them to record is of little concern to me except that they were from very diverse backgrounds and they lived at different times in history....and yet the Bible's 66 books tell one story and are all completely harmonious despite the the bridging of time between Adam's creation and the fulfillment of John's Revelation, which we see taking place in this "time of the end" foretold by Daniel over 500 years before Jesus was even born. That is what inspires me about the Bible, not the minor details which some like to twist. Creating doubt is one of the devil's best tactics.....it worked with Eve and its been working for him ever since.

Paul is thought by modern scholarship to be the author of the first Thessalonians but not the second.

As above. Modern scholarship means little to me if one scholar disagrees with another...pick your scholar.
That's a bit like the disagreements in science.....pick your scientist.

Would you be prepared to examine those arguments to see if they were well-formed from the evidence? Or are such possibilities already ruled out?

They would make no difference to me...they are minor details and I have a big picture to concentrate on....a few dead pixels here and there are barely worth a mention to me.

This touches on another major question, and I suspect difference, between us. For me, truth is conformity with reality. If you want to know whether something is true, you go and look at it with an open mind, and see what the evidence says.

I couldn't agree more...but at the end of the day we all seek information from our preferred source and hold onto our our own conclusions based on what we want to believe. Reality for me is what I see, but also what I feel in a very deep part of my soul. I am, and always have been a "spiritual" person. I have had a spiritual connection to God all my life, even though I was raised in a church system that I came to despise for its complete failure to represent God's teachings accurately on this earth. This is nothing new, because the exact same thing happened to Israel. Men corrupted what was once pure with human thinking and twisted interpretation. It was foretold because of who is running this show down here. (1 John 5:19)

You on the other hand are prepared to accept prophecy as true ─ please correct me if that's wrong ─ and the question of whether prophecy can ever be true doesn't seem to enter into it. For instance, how can something that only works after the event, and then only by construction based on unexamined principles, be 'true' in any sense?

That is not the way I see prophesy at all. I look at all the prophesies on the end times and I see amazing details fulfilled that could not have been brought about by chance.

We can discuss some of these if you are willing to examine them?

I equate sincerity with a view honestly held. The idea that a god would be angry with someone for honestly and thoughtfully reaching a wrong conclusion about religion seems ─ well, if not Bronze Age, at least pre-Enlightenment.

You see, that is a complete misunderstanding of the facts IMO. It isn't that God is angry with anyone for honestly and thoughtfully reaching a wrong conclusion.

No one is pre-determined for life or death. At birth, we are a blank canvas, waiting for genes and heredity and environment, and people to shape who we become. When we reach an age where we can think for ourselves, we have all the same choices, but circumstances make it more difficult for some than others to implement those choices. We weigh up our options and each of us makes our decisions based on who we are. IOW, when it comes to the crunch, we determine our own destiny by the choices we make and how strongly we make them. We will all finally be caught in the act of being ourselves. There will be no excuses to offer God because those decisions were ours to make freely, based on what we think and feel. God will not interfere with our free will.

They may well have been educated according to the standards of the day, but in those days everyone, wise or ignorant, knew the earth was flat, and the center of the universe, and the sun went round it, because, gosh, you only had to look to see it was right. The idea of a spherical earth was round in Greece in ancient times, as you mentioned, but although there's much evidence of the impact of Greek philosophy and thought on Judaism and early Christianity via Alexandria from around the end of the 2nd cent BCE, nothing of a round earth shows up in the bible: eg Matthew's mountain from which you could see all the kingdoms of the earth, or Revelation's stars falling out of the sky onto the earth, and so on.

So there's no surprise that the cosmology of the bible is of its day. What else could it be? Who knows how primitive our science will seem in two hundred years' time?

I see no point in debating what people knew and when they knew it. What matters most is the world we live in now and not taking things like you mention above as literal. Examine the context and the circumstances and see that whatever means the devil used to show Jesus "all the kingdom's of the world in an instant of time", was supernatural. No literal mountain could provide such a view literally...it would be impossible. The stars in Revelation did not have to be literal either as stars were also seen in Jesus' hands.

It doesn't take much study to reach logical conclusions but it does require an open mind....and reliance on God to open up the heart to possibilities not yet considered. Digging deeper reveals the better quality "gems".

 

[blü 2]

As I understand it, the Bible is the word of God, not the thoughts of the ones holding the pen.

And, faith being faith, this can't be questioned? There are doubts you're not allowed (or, will never allow yourself) to have, conclusions you're not allowed (or, will never allow yourself) to reach?

Whoever God chose to write down what he inspired them to record is of little concern to me except that they were from very diverse backgrounds and they lived at different times in history....and yet the Bible's 66 books tell one story and are all completely harmonious

From where I sit, that's not a sustainable conclusion. Each book is a human product from a particular time and place for a particular human purpose, whether folk-history, song, the rules of priestcraft, wisdom sayings, politics and polemic, exhortation, and so on. The god of the Torah is one of many gods, and so described; the Decalogue says 'no gods before me', not 'no other gods'; and [he]'s a tribal god, his covenant being with the Jews, not a universal god. This changes later, of course ─ the concept of God changes across the centuries.

Creating doubt is one of the devil's best tactics.....it worked with Eve

So you disapprove of humans knowing good from evil?

(And no devil is present in the Garden story, just the snake ─ another observation about what the text actually says.)

As above. Modern scholarship means little to me if one scholar disagrees with another...pick your scholar.

Yes, we can shop for views that suit us; but some arguments are based on evidence and some aren't; and some arguments make more sense than others. If we don't fully understand criticism of our position, we don't understand our own position.

Reality for me is what I see, but also what I feel in a very deep part of my soul.

Would it be fair to say you're better at emotion than at reason?

That is not the way I see prophesy at all. I look at all the prophesies on the end times and I see amazing details fulfilled that could not have been brought about by chance.

A prophecy, to be credible evidence of supernatural foresight, must be credibly recorded in all its detail at a particular time and place so that it can't be changed retrospectively, must foretell something unforeseeable, specific, detailed and remote, and must be credibly recorded at its fulfillment. No purported prophecy in the bible comes close, not one. If you disagree, by all means present an example.

No one is pre-determined for life or death.

It follows that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient.

God will not interfere with our free will.

Not least the freewill of thugs, murderers, drug cartels, etc.

I see no point in debating what people knew and when they knew it.

I take it that you accept the bible makes scientific, historical, medical and other errors, then?

it does require an open mind....and reliance on God to open up the heart to possibilities not yet considered.

You can't have 'an open mind' and 'reliance on God' in the one sentence, surely? An open mind would begin with an examination of questions like, What is meant by 'God'? Does God exist outside of the imagination of individuals? If so, how, and how can anyone know? And so on.

As I've probably already said, I've found many descriptions of imaginary gods; but I've never found a coherent description of a real god, one with objective existence, such that if we found such a being we could determine whether we'd found a god or not. I find that a major barrier to understanding what talk of 'God' could actually be about.

 

[SkepticThinker]

Well, you see, that is what has been my beef all along. It is the scientists who are not living up to their own standards.

We’re not talking about me or scientists here Deeje. We’re talking about you. “Proof” is not the standard of science. Proof is YOUR standard. You demand proof from others, yet can’t provide the proof for your own beliefs. It’s not the scientists being hypocritical here, it is YOU who is being hypocritical. I’d like you to try and address that instead of trying to put this off on others. We are talking about your standards that you continually and repeatedly demand from scientists and other people who accept the findings of science.

You require "proof" for God's existence and yet you feel adequately qualified to eliminate all mention of an Intelligent Creator because you can't test for his existence with any method science has ever developed. Does that mean that he can't exist or that you want proof before you will believe? I demand the same. If you are going to kill off God by telling us that there is no proof for his existence, then you better have something more substantial than guesswork and probabilities fired by nothing but vivid imaginations.

Once again, evolution says nothing about the existence of God(s).

This isn’t about me Deeje, it’s about the hypocritical position you hold (while you try to project your hypocrisy onto everyone else). That’s not the position that scientists hold; it’s the position YOU hold.

By the way, I don’t require proof of God’s existence, but I do require good evidence. And that goes for anything that someone claims the existence of. I need to be convinced of the veracity of a claim before I can believe it. I don’t “eliminate all mention of an Intelligent Creator” (and let’s be honest here, you’re talking specifically about the one particular God you worship). Rather, I see no need to include any intelligent creators in any explanations about the natural world because I don’t see any need to insert God(s) into it. I don’t see that the natural world requires any intelligent designer(s) and seems to work just fine all on its own. Not including God in this equation doesn’t equate to me “killing off God.” Not including unicorns or fairies in my explanation for the natural world doesn’t equate to me “killing off” unicorns or fairies, does it?

Remember, I used to believe in some version of the Christian god, until I realized I didn’t have any good evidence to believe what I did and really, I just believed it because I wanted it to be true. Now, you may very well have what you consider to be good evidence and good reasons to believe in the God you worship (though you haven’t presented much) and I take you at you at your word that that’s good enough for you. But it’s not necessarily enough to convince me or anyone else.

I ask for proof that evolution is true by the very same methods that you yourselves use and yet....the "evidence" you provide is riddled with assertion, supposition and suggestions about what "might have" or "could have" taken place all those millions of years ago. No proof means no facts, and no facts mean that you believe without actual proof.....How are you any different to us? You have just as much of a belief system as we do...you just won't acknowledge it. The power of suggestion is at work in so many areas of human experience.....but it works. The commercial world depends on it...the political world depends on it...the religious world depends on it....and so does science.

And again, science doesn’t deal in proofs; it deals in EVIDENCE. No proof does not mean no facts. Evolution is defined as the “change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generation.” That occurs and that is a fact. A scientific theory is “a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.” So yes, there are many facts involved in the theory of evolution. Again, it is one of the most well-substantiated scientific theories in existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution

If you can’t see how the systematic method of observing and collecting data, testing and re-testing, repeating, and re-adjusting when new information comes to light is so completely different from relying solely on ancient, unchanging texts purported to be written by God(s) and therefore unchallengeable, then I can’t help you. Has reading the Bible allowed to us to make significant medical advances, or demonstrated the laws of physics or helped us build airplanes or took us to the moon? Nope. The method I just described gave us all of that.

Science doesn’t depend on suggestion. It depends on EVIDENCE.

Christians believe that this life is a test....all of us will either pass it or fail. That is the Bible's message. Either we have what God is looking for in the citizens who will populate his "new earth" to come....or we are rejected. In a nutshell...that's it.

Good for you. You’re just telling me what you believe but not why you believe it. Why I should believe your claims over the millions of others made by religious people of all faiths. Or why I should put any stock into what the Bible claims about anything. I could cite the Qu’ran to you, but would that convince you that it’s true?

We will all know, one way or the other eventually. In the meantime I will keep plugging away and exposing evolutionary science for the gigantic fraud that I believe it is....based on nothing but creatively wishful thinking and a really good marketing machine.

Perhaps you could explain how “evolutionary science” is different from any other science that you do accept? (I’ve asked you this before, to no avail.) You do know that the science that is used to demonstrate evolution is the same science used to demonstrate all the other scientific theories that you do accept. It’s not like evolutionary biologists are doing some kind of made up stuff they just threw together one day to deceive the world. And while we’re on the subject of mass conspiracy theories, what reason(s) is it that you propose that thousands and thousands of independently working groups of scientists from all over the world are lying to us, and have been lying to us for over 150 years? If you say it’s to “kill God” or whatever, then you’re stuck having to explain why born-again Christian Francis Collins is trying to “kill God.”

Those who want God to go away will have their wish granted....for now.

But what happens if in the future, God wants them to go away? Is that fair?

I think it will certainly be an interesting exercise.

Yes, please do let us know when the end is close. All the predictions for the end of the world have been sooo accurate so far.

 

[viole]

Does evolution totally remove God, and spirit from reality.

If yes, how so?

If no, how so?

Yes, it does. Particularly with garden variety gods like the Abrahmic ones.

Ciao

- viole

 

[GoodbyeDave]

Yes, it does. Particularly with garden variety gods like the Abrahmic ones.

But the majority of believers in the "Abrahamic" god have no problem with evolution. Even in the USA, the home of creationism, Catholic schools are forbidden to teach it.

If it comes to that, the original question was about the possibility of belief in both evolution and a spiritual reality. Belief in a spiritual reality is hardly the same as belief in Yahweh/Allah. The thread got hijacked!

 

[viole]

But the majority of believers in the "Abrahamic" god have no problem with evolution. Even in the USA, the home of creationism, Catholic schools are forbidden to teach it.

If it comes to that, the original question was about the possibility of belief in both evolution and a spiritual reality. Belief in a spiritual reality is hardly the same as belief in Yahweh/Allah. The thread got hijacked!

So, you have no problem whatsoever with the standard view that we and trees have the same ancestors, and we all are the way we are because of opportunistic selection of random traits.

IOW: do you agree that man is only the product of contingencies that could very well not have happened?

Ciao

- viole

 

[metis]

But the majority of believers in the "Abrahamic" god have no problem with evolution. Even in the USA, the home of creationism, Catholic schools are forbidden to teach it.

Catholic schools in the United States and other countriesteach evolution as part of their science curriculum. Theyteach that evolution occurs and the modern evolutionarysynthesis, which is the scientific theory that explains howevolution proceeds. This is the same evolution curriculum that secular schools teach. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution

BTW, four of my grandkids went to or are now in Catholic schools/universities, and they all learned about it in their science and theology classes.

 

[gnostic]

I never tried to make a perfect creation. When I do make something and it goes wrong I do not tend to accuse what I made, as God did in the Garden of Eden myth.


I see that logic is not in your toolbox. God made Adam and Eve without the knowledge of right and wrong. When you make a creation with that lack one can't blame the creation for doing wrong.

I have made similar points like yours, in past threads.

It makes Eden story conflicting and irrational.

 

[GoodbyeDave]

Catholic schools in the United States and other countries teach evolution as part of their science curriculum.

That's exactly what I said. In the phrase "Catholic schools are forbidden to teach it", the antecedent to "it" is "creationalism" in the same sentence. Don't they teach English grammar in USian schools?

 

[The Hammer]

Does evolution totally remove God, and spirit from reality.

If yes, how so?

If no, how so?

I don't believe so, because if evolution is a fundamental theory of our universe, then I believe that God(s) is/are just an evolutionary extension of the universe itself. Basically, a universe within the universe that is itself a force of creation.

 

[Audie]

I don't believe so, because if evolution is a fundamental theory of our universe, then I believe that God(s) is/are just an evolutionary extension of the universe itself. Basically, a universe within the universe that is itself a force of creation.

Translate?

 

[The Hammer]

Translate?

I view the universe, as a whole, is the most "complex" evolved thing/being. God(s) are lesser evolved aspects of the universe and the natural world (Life, Death, Peace, Passion, Time, Chaos, Order). And then purely physical things (humans, animals, earth/wind/fire/water, etc), are merely of the natural world.