Evolution and Christianity and Salvation

[Drich]

All is always possible in fan fiction.

Meanwhile, in mere reality..there was no adam and eve - full stop.  If the authors of magic book were writing today, it would read "and then god cursed them to sit in a cubicle for the rest of their days" - because the point of that story was not to record history, but to explain a then-current state of human affairs.

yes by ADDING TO Cannon. Example in legends The emporer lives after rotj because he had clones of himself made just in case.. plus he could transfer is essence through a new dark side power.


Or it is speculated in episode 9 Vader is to return using some special force magic that no one has ever heard of.

Fan fiction and or even post canonical material can often be made to say anything if cannon is not closed. Here in genesis 1-6 cannon is closed and no new info can be added nor none taken away.

Now to full understand what God has done here he has given our simple ancestors the single simple read they needed, then without changing a word only how the passage is read all of the paradoxes the simple read creates is gone and now something as complex as the theory of evolution in it complete unmolested form can also be assimilated into an unmolested reading of genesis 1-6

This is like starwars as it is a story arch that spans multi generations but un like it the story is not allowed to change but even though not one word has changed it's whole meaning now takes on a form that allows what we have evidence for

[The Grand Nudger]

All is always possible in fan fiction.

Meanwhile, in mere reality..there was no adam and eve - full stop.  If the authors of magic book were writing today, it would read "and then god cursed them to sit in a cubicle for the rest of their days" - because the point of that story was not to record history, but to explain a then-current state of human affairs.

yes by ADDING TO Cannon.

You say that like your "resolution" doesn't.  I don't see the point, personally.  Why add something that doesn't resolve the paradox when you can simply and truthfully say "fuckers had no idea what they were talking about"?  The answer is always right there, it's just a book. Gods, even if they did exist, don't give a shit about magic books. They didn't write them, they don't vouch for their accuracy. They don't descend from on high with a highlighter and whiteout.

To the extent that a magic book is wrong, or bigoted, or just simply outdated...is a thoroughly human problem. Treating the peculiar psyche of the author as though it were a god is the height of heretical inanity.

-but you do you...right? You can make your god as small and ignorant as you need it to be in order to justify your own dickish myopia, lol. I'll keep on mentioning how hilarious it is when a person does this and then insists that it's those filthy godless atheists who aren't taking the idea seriously.

[mrj]

gods spark, is that what they're calling it now?

More literally it would be 'the breath of G-d'.  This discussion interested me because it appears that the Catholics reconciled their beliefs with evolution by lifting from the Jewish tradition. Long, long before Charles Darwin came along, the Sages of the Talmud discussed the generations before Adam. Adam was the first man to have the Breath of G-d breathed into him.

Yes, the Christian rationalization of Evolution is similar to the Jewish concept of 'God breathing into Adam' with others alive.
However, Christianity has the interesting property of Original Sin, meaning that everyone alive today (and at the time of Jesus) was a direct descendant of this "Adam".  No one else was given a soul unless they have this Adam in the ancestry.

My point is that such a rationalization (one human in our past gets a soul, no one else, and we are all descended from him) is not satisfying.  You MUST believe this (or be a Creationist).  Salvation is a core tenant of Christianity.  It is not optional.  It may be THE core tenant.

Therefore, you MUST accept that many people lived on this planet for generations without souls.  Y Chromosome Adam is estimate to have lived  200,000 years ago.  So, if you want to believe in Evolution and be a Christian, God injected the first soul into a human ~200,000 or earlier.   

And, because the population, must have been, minimally, several tens of thousand at the time, there were vast numbers of people that lived for generations, including relatives of Adam (his parents of course) without souls.

This is not optional, like, say, Noah's ark, nativity, or similar.  The above is an essential rationalization of Christianity and Science.  Either accept it, or be a Creationist.

As someone that was raised as a Christian, and has tried to rationalize Christianity with science, the above really bothers me.  You can wiggle around almost everything else.  But the above is essential.  Really hard to accept.

I've asked Christians about this and most ignore it because they don't want to talk about it, others say that's why you can't believe in Evolution at all, and then there are the rare few that say yes, there were many, many soul-less people alive for generation after generation until, over time, interbreeding created a fully souled world, and then Jesus saved them all.  Really strange.

[Yonadav]

More literally it would be 'the breath of G-d'.  This discussion interested me because it appears that the Catholics reconciled their beliefs with evolution by lifting from the Jewish tradition. Long, long before Charles Darwin came along, the Sages of the Talmud discussed the generations before Adam. Adam was the first man to have the Breath of G-d breathed into him.

Yes, the Christian rationalization of Evolution is similar to the Jewish concept of 'God breathing into Adam' with others alive.
However, Christianity has the interesting property of Original Sin, meaning that everyone alive today (and at the time of Jesus) was a direct descendant of this "Adam".  No one else was given a soul unless they have this Adam in the ancestry.

My point is that such a rationalization (one human in our past gets a soul, no one else, and we are all descended from him) is not satisfying.  You MUST believe this (or be a Creationist).  Salvation is a core tenant of Christianity.  It is not optional.  It may be THE core tenant.

Therefore, you MUST accept that many people lived on this planet for generations without souls.  Y Chromosome Adam is estimate to have lived  200,000 years ago.  So, if you want to believe in Evolution and be a Christian, God injected the first soul into a human ~200,000 or earlier.   

And, because the population, must have been, minimally, several tens of thousand at the time, there were vast numbers of people that lived for generations, including relatives of Adam (his parents of course) without souls.

This is not optional, like, say, Noah's ark, nativity, or similar.  The above is an essential rationalization of Christianity and Science.  Either accept it, or be a Creationist.

As someone that was raised as a Christian, and has tried to rationalize Christianity with science, the above really bothers me.  You can wiggle around almost everything else.  But the above is essential.  Really hard to accept.

I've asked Christians about this and most ignore it because they don't want to talk about it, others say that's why you can't believe in Evolution at all, and then there are the rare few that say yes, there were many, many soul-less people alive for generation after generation until, over time, interbreeding created a fully souled world, and then Jesus saved them all.  Really strange.

In Judaism, every creature has a soul. Humans have more than one. The breath of the Divine is one of them. The generations before Adam had the animal soul. We have the concept of gilgul, which is basically reincarnation. Many of those who lived in the generations before Adam are reborn in each generation after him. They are reborn with the Divine aspect of the soul in them. A gilgul's purpose is to get things right that they didn't get right in their previous go round. The gilgulim from the generations before Adam are reputed to be a rather unruly lot.

[The Grand Nudger]

Which would be impressive, if we were the baseline of the "ruly" chunk.   

[mrj]

 
All 4 premises are false, so any conclusion would be. 

If you are a Creationist, and accept the literal interpretation of the Bible, that Adam was created as the first and only human with a soul, then YES, all premises are false.  

But my discussion is specifically about those individuals that are attempting to rationalize Christianity with science.  There is a widespread movement today where Christians reject the literal interpretation of the Bible, claiming there is nothing wrong with accepting the vast, widespread and indisputable scientific, archaeological, and mathematical evidence across every field that evolution is, in general,  truth.

But if you DO accept evolution, you must accept the above 4 premises.  I see no way around it.

[The Grand Nudger]

The notion that a soul is an issue of biological inheritance is probably the most troubling part of the whole bit, but that flies completely under the radar.

[Yonadav]

The notion that a soul is an issue of biological inheritance is probably the most troubling part of the whole bit, but that flies completely under the radar.

No, it doesn't fly completely under the radar. It would merely be the topic of a different discussion.

[The Grand Nudger]

Any attempt at a genetic rationalization of souls puts it front and center. I appreciate that it may not fly under your radar, but it does fly under the catholic radar, the op radar, and it certainly flies under drichs radar..etc.

[Yonadav]

Any attempt at a genetic rationalization of souls puts it front and center.  I appreciate that it may not fly under your radar, but it does fly under the catholic radar, the op radar, and it certainly flies under drichs radar..etc.

But no genetic rationalization was actually given. It was more of a genetic analogy. The Divine soul is passed on like genes.