[Erin] The unhappy evolutionary

The problem with accepting belief in God and evolution and modern science is, as Christopher Hitchens has repeated a number of times, that you have to accept that an omnibenevolent, omnipotent being first created then allowed to die something like 98% of all animal life. That for about 100,000 to 250,000 years man was allowed to continue in darkness with no succour, no hint of divine relief. That all of this ended when God finally made his appearance to an out of the way tribe in the Levant, and that He still refuses to provide anything in the way of solid proof of His existence.

A logical case can be made for this, I suppose, but it's just not very compelling and it ends up resorting to the divine ineffability of the Creator.

Erin, you're certainly correct that natural selection and a Divine Creator aren't necessarily at odds. But as Derek points out, there's more to it. If a God was in fact involved in the creation and structuring of the material universe, than it is reasonable to assume that the material universe tells us something about the Creator, since, presumably, the universe is more or less as that Creator wants it to be. This is where the real conflict comes from. Many people who take a good hard look at the material world through the lens of science find the kind of God that Christianity posits very improbable. It is out of bounds to claim God impossible, or definitively disproved, but it is absolutely reasonable to conclude that the idea is of negligible likelihood.

I don't often find myself agreeing with Derek Copold, but in this case, I admire how well, and how succinctly, he has made the point. That's it, in a nutshell.

Some corollaries to the problem of reconciling evolution and Christianity: the story of the Fall posits that most characteristics of human behavior reflect a devolution from a perfect state, inflicted by God as punishment for the sin of our ancestor in the distant past. But science, looking at these same characteristics, sees them as developing naturally as a result of selection operating over time on our primate genes.

I find the extinction events triggered by comet and meteorite strikes particularly difficult to explain within the framework of a creation/evolution amalgam. Long before there were any humans around to trigger "the Fall" and the ensuing imperfections of nature, God must have set up the solar system so that all life on Earth would periodically get creamed by giant rocks falling out of the sky to trigger catastrophe. What's up with that? The Flood event recorded in most human mythologies may well have been the result of such a catastrophe. Which would require one to wrap one's head around the idea that millions of years before people became self-aware and started misbehaving, God created the Oort cloud and stirred it with his finger so a big ball of rock and ice would be inbound on its long trajectory just in time to arrive and punish everyone for doing the things their primate genes--which he apparently created--impelled them to do. Sorry . . . I'd like to preserve an idea of the numinous and sacred, but that paradigm is too complicated for me. It's like the epicycles--good effort, but in the long run it just doesn't work any more.

I believe that He directly created the souls not only of the first two fully human creatures on Earth, but that He continues this act of direct creation of the souls of every human being in existence. In other words, the human body may have been formed by evolution, but the immortal soul of every human being is not something which developed naturally, or exists as a naturally occurring characteristic of the material existence of humans.

What is the "soul"? The Hebrew nephesh/neshamah often refers to the entirety of the person, not the "inner man." And there are only two New Testament passages that distinguish soul from Spirit, if they even do that.

I don't think the church - Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, radical or otherwise - has adequately addressed the definition/meaning of "soul" in a way that can be clearly shown to be seen/supported in the Biblical text. And as science shows more and more each day how much of what we consider to be a person's "personality" or "soul" is affected by, or effected by, electrical-chemical actions/reactions, it becomes more and more euphemistic and anachronistic to use the term "soul" without explaining in a concise and precise and valid way what we mean by it - especially how we distinguish it from the body and, for Christian purposes, how we distinguish it from the spirit, if there is such a distinction (i.e., is your anthropology trichotomous or dichotomous).

So ... what do YOU mean by "soul," and why ... and how do you distinguish it from the Body in a way that is scientifically and theologically defensible and provable?

Its only difficult because people seem to equate 'natural selection forces' with inevitably skewing toward big, bad, mean and brutish species and behavior.

Do you see NO value, on a survival level, for compassion? Several animal species show altruism, self-sacrifice, homosexuality, and while not vowed, have large numbers of their species who are celibate.

For bees and ants, only a tiny portion of their group ever even have the capacity to have sex. The rest are a support system for those who do.

In wolf packs, only the alpha pair ever reproduce, and the rest support that pair in their efforts, and each other.

We have whole sites dedicated for various animals, without training, doing altruistic acts, or self sacrifice, both for humans, and for other animals.

So, are they experiencing sin, free will, and sacrificial love as well?

Karen,
So, are they experiencing sin, free will, and sacrificial love as well?
No, and there's the rub with your arguement. There is no scientific evidence that the behaviors that you listed are anything but 'natural'/instinctual (and therefore categories like "sin, etc" are irrelevant. When you show me evidence that drone bees have psychological battles with their little bee ids in order to model the queen bees sacrifical love through a life of drone-dom, then I will begin to accept that the celibate bee is in any way analogous to the celibate monk.

Marc -- I wouldn't say that it's "equally" valid, but it's certainly an arguable point. But none of the things you listed are entirely exclusive to humans, except perhaps voluntary celibacy.

And even if that weren't the case, seemingly aberrant human behavior hardly stacks up against the rest of the natural world as evidence for the nature of a Divine Creator. That's monumental hubris.

Marc:

My remarks appeared as "Anon" due to hitting the Post button too soon.

Hi Marc,

There's an interesting episode in The Brothers Karamzov where the dunderhead Grigory was teaching the young Smerdyakov about the Bible. Smerdyakov was a little older than your son, but not as sophisticated because there was no wii or internet access in 19th century Russia!

"Grigory taught him to read and write, and when he was twelve years old, began teaching him the Scriptures. But this teaching came to nothing. At the second or third lesson the boy suddenly grinned.

"What's that for?" asked Grigory, looking at him threateningly from under his spectacles.

"Oh, nothing. God created light on the first day, and the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day. Where did the light come from on the first day?"

Grigory was thunderstruck. The boy looked sarcastically at his teacher. There was something positively condescending in his expression. Grigory could not restrain himself. "I'll show you where!" he cried, and gave the boy a violent slap on the cheek."

Grigory was a faithful servant, but something of a knucklehead.

Would it have helped Smerdyakov if Grigory was a bit less literally-minded? Maybe it would have helped if Grigory better understood the nature of Torah as Scripture, not as scientific literature, e.g. Genesis is silent about all kinds of phenomena, e.g. the creation of the angelic host.

Would it have helped if Grigory could have whipped out Christopher Rowland's The Open Heaven and explained the apocalyptic silence of Torah? Probably not.

Smerdyakov, like Ivan, was bright, but morally retarded, as you can see by reading the rest of the novel--he liked to torture cats and then offer funeral masses for them. Neither Smerdyakov nor Ivan had the experiences of God's love that Dmitri and Alyosha had. They suffered developmentally by comparison.

Too bad Smerdyakov didn't have a kindly Dr Herzenstube giving him a pound of nuts and teaching him about "Gott der Vater, Gott der Sohn, und Gott der heilige Geist."

But also, certainly pseudoscience ***and*** pseudofaith sets our kids up for intellectual difficulties later...

Sincerely,
John

So, he has the intellectually skeptical kid turn out to be a cat torturer.

Somehow, not overly surprising.

Tmatt asked, "Would you agree with John Paul II that Christians cannot accept that the process of creation was random and without purpose?"

Yes, absolutely. I actually had more quotes lined up to add from various Catholic sources getting into specifics about Catholic thought on evolution, but realized pretty quickly that I'd be writing a book-length post if I got carried away.

Essentially, the Catholic believes that God may or may not have chosen to use evolution as His mechanism of creation, and that we humans may or may not come to understand various aspects of creation through science. There is nothing random or purposeless about evolution, then, should it turn out to be God's creation mechanism--but that doesn't mean that order and purpose will always be immediately discernible, or even discoverable by the highest and best-trained scientific/mathematical minds.

Creation is always the province of God, whether we're speaking of direct, immediate, miraculous creation or indirect, gradual, and natural means of creation.

Whoops, Erin wrote that post, not Rod.

Hi Karen,
In fairness to Dostoevsky, ISTM all the characters in TBK have a nasty sadistic streak, even Alyosha and Zossima. See the hair-raising chapter "The Little Demon" (XI.3).

Dostoevsky describes the human condition all too well. What gets us into trouble if we're believers (OK, non-believers too) is denial of the various factors that makes us humans. We're neither angels nor apes, or for that matter, apes in trousers.

OTOH, if we're catechizing people into the mysteries of the Christian faith, we gravely harm our hearers if we introduce them to mysteries they're not developmentally prepared to hear, much less understand.
John

Hi Derek,

I gotta run, but Ivan's character is not all that impeccable. Again, see "The Little Demon" (XI.3). He too is a sadist. He collects stories of tortured children, but he doesn't know how to deal with that side of himself. He wants to be angel but without God. Ivan doesn't know how to deal with the base lackey insect beastly Karamazov side of his character, so he tries to deny it. But it doesn't work. He incarnates Pascal's observation, "Man is neither angel nor beast, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would play the angel plays the beast."

See the bizarre interactions between Alyosha and Lisa (when Ivan had come to visit earlier):

"You know, when I read about that Jew I shook with sobs all night.
I kept fancying how the little thing cried and moaned (a child of four
years old understands, you know), and all the while the thought of
pineapple compote haunted me. In the morning I wrote a letter to a certain person, begging him particularly to come and see me. He came and I suddenly told him all about the child and the pineapple compote. All about it, all, and said that it was nice. He laughed and said it really was nice. Then he got up and went away. He was only here five minutes. Did he despise me? Did he despise me? Tell me, tell me, Alyosha, did he despise me or not?" She sat up on the couch, with flashing eyes.

"Tell me," Alyosha asked anxiously, "did you send for that person?"

"Yes, I did."

"Did you send him a letter?"

"Yes."

"Simply to ask about that, about that child?"

"No, not about that at all. But when he came, I asked him about that at once. He answered, laughed, got up and went away."

"That person behaved honourably," Alyosha murmured.

"And did he despise me? Did he laugh at me?"

"No, for perhaps he believes in the pineapple compote himself. He is very ill now, too, Lise."

"Yes, he does believe in it," said Lise, with flashing eyes.

"He doesn't despise anyone," Alyosha went on. "Only he does not
believe anyone. If he doesn't believe in people, of course, he does
despise them."

"Then he despises me, me?"

"You, too."

"Good." Lise seemed to grind her teeth. "When he went out
laughing, I felt that it was nice to be despised. The child with fingers cut off is nice, and to be despised is nice..."

And she laughed in Alyosha's face, a feverish malicious laugh."

It's a painful painful chapter. Ivan didn't deal with his shadow self... and was paying the emotional price.
John

Derek Copold, The problem with accepting belief in God and evolution and modern science is...that you have to accept that an omnibenevolent, omnipotent being first created then allowed to die something like 98% of all animal life. That for about 100,000 to 250,000 years man was allowed to continue in darkness with no succour, no hint of divine relief.

I don't know where you get this. Lots of errors.

1) First, if you read the OT, it's clear that early man knew God existed and had a limited realtionship with him. And who is man to question if man deserves succour? Hath not the potter authority over the clay? My view, merely as an observer, is that man rejects most of the good until he starts to suffer from his errors.

2) If you study human evolution, it's also clear that the institution of religion (along with trade and war) has been around at least as long a human as language. It's been quite a while.

3) I don't know where you get 100-250,000 years from. Genetic science shows we split from chimps 5 million years ago (+/- a million). Why you would pick any particular date for the infusion of the soul I wouldn't know, but it seems you are going past your data.

But the raw arrogance of humans blows my mind. We don't know squat - we can't even work the logic of the material world out (try to "understand" quantum mechanics someday) and yet we wish to wrap our wee little minds around the infinite? Pathetic.

In the end, if we say the material world explains everything, humans ain't much. But I can't help but notice that most people don't live this way: they live life as if it matters, as if love and the lives of the people around them are more important than that if we were mere carbon lined water bags. These so-called materialists are living in denial of their own theories! Not exactly encouraging for their theory, since they clearly don't believe it themselves.

Erin: Darwin really does deserve respect for his development of evolution. In fact, he was the first person to offer many new theories about humans for the first time. For example, in the Descent of Man of 1871 he thought that humans lost our body hair due to sexual selection in both forms (intersexual and intrasexual) and that genetic selection for human head hair that grows without stopping (unique among primates and even other mammals) was genetic for the same reason. Genetic studies have verified and supported much of Darwins ideas since (from date estimates for each mutation) and many of these ideas other scientists were quite skeptical about. In fact, I remember reading a lot of Darwin's stuff that I found very doubtful at the time that have since been supported by genetics, and I'm very much impressed how prescient Darwin was. He had a lot of intuition and even genius.

One more thing: Darwin didn't think his theory supported belief in God nor denied it. He was just a plain old scientist. And a good one, a guy who didn't go past his data like so many numbskulls do today.

Excellent thread, all of you. I have just one thing to add: Mdavid, ya gotta admit that some of those numbskulls can be vastly entertaining. ;-)

Badly phrased question, Gerry. Only a species can be labeled extinct. Variations within a species come and go, and sometimes return.

From the genetic POV, racial identity is a purely emotional and subjective observation.

Gosh, JPL, what good points. No doubt they'll change some minds. :p

Gotta go with ossicle, Franklin.

What's more accurate to say is that there's no genetic warrant to create separate legal or moral categories based on race.

Derek Copold

Are we to take the OT literally or not?

It's clearly not literal, but the message is obvious to any reasonable reader. You can't have it both ways: you say humans are too smart and understand to world too well to believe in God, otoh you demand a divine text to read as a science book and yet have no poetry to touch the heart? Please.

man's relationship with God in prehistoric times is that it included quite a bit of human sacrifice. A bit sloppy on the part of the deity, no?

Can't have free will and goodness at the same time. Surely, you're not this obtuse. If you are, you certainly have no business reflecting on the infinite!

Ah, divine ineffability, as I anticipated. You can say God's ways are beyond us, but then you have to accept that we have no way of knowing that God is good or worthy of worship?

You don't understand me. My point is that man simply is not smart enough to even understand the world we live in, let alone grab for the infinite and try to explain the motives of God. As for being "worthy" of worship, that's a pretty tall order: all I know for sure is I'm not "worthy" of diddly squat, so I'm not sitting in judgment of my creator anytime soon. As a scientist merely looking at the data, I must say your arrogance as a primate with a life span of 100 years stuck on the third rock from the sun is, well, mind-boggling.

Francis Collins dates modern humans arising 100,000 years ago. Richard Dawkins estimates 250,000 years ago, so you have a range between an extreme atheist and a believer.

I don't do science based upon a popularity contest. Who cares if a scientist is a "believer" or not? In truth, there is no "modern man" date - evolution has been ongoing and is still going on. Besides, what makes you so sure when the soul was infused into "modern" man? This is rank speculation at best unless you have some specific mutation you think leads to free will and the soul. I've read the data, and I'm not holding my breath.

Hi Derek,

Dostoevsky doesn't lay out all his cards about Ivan all at once. I think in fact Ivan ***does*** collect the horrific vignettes about tortured children, precisely because he is titillated by them.

He fancies himself as an eyewitness, an innocent bystander to the evils around him, but Dostoevsky shows us how Ivan is not the disinterested observer he thinks he is.

IMO, it's important to read the Torture Children/Grand Inquisitor scene in the light of the later Demons chapter. Now that I think about it, there are interesting parallels between the Bulgarian torturer's fondness for sweet things (that line chills me) and Lisa/Ivan's own fondness for pineapple compote.

Lisa and Ivan are both sadists (and Alyosha recognizes his own tendencies here as well). Lisa acts on it when she slams her finger in the door, and there are hints in the Demon chapter that she hoped (!) Ivan would mistreat her--that's why she wrote him and invited him to see her.

Ivan tortures himself and slowly goes insane when he recognizes his beastly side but represses it.

Ivan's problem is he never experienced the refracted light of God's love (refracted through ordinary acts of human kindness, compared to the glancing rays of the evening sun) like Alyosha or Dmitri or Zossima did. In spite of their own great capacities for brutality, all three had great experiences of grace.

This powerful experience turned them around and changed their lives, so they too could genuinely be "lovers of mankind" in action. Unlike Ivan, they did not simply pass themselves off as bystanders who believed they could return back their life's ticket to God and then go blow their brains out when they got tired of life.

Dostoevsky tried to show there are no innocent bystanders in life, who could pass themselves off as eyewitnesses to life without getting our hands dirty.

Anyway, that's how I read the story.
John

No, Franklin, I did not miss your point, I am saying something different from what you are.

Erin,

[P]eople who speak in the name of science who claim that empirical reality is all there is... bear as much authority for Science as a Robertson or Phelps bear for Christianity, being little to none.

That doesn't mean I disagree with your main point, really. I do, in general, disagree with where you assert the boundary lines to be.

Ossicle, thanks for clarifying.

"The real conflict between religion and science often comes about when science claims that the ability to demonstrate certain empirical truths automatically disproves the existence of the non-material."

Science makes no such claim. There is simply a lack of evidence for the "immaterial" (let's be honest here, supernatural) that can be tested, confirmed, and held up to peer review. In the absence of testable or verifiable evidence, it can have no place in science. Otherwise any claim could be held up as scientific, regardless of it's merits.

You have a very poor understanding of how science operates.

Well, The Deuce, last I heard eyes and flagella and explosions of any sort were empirically verifiable realities, while the soul, being non-material, isn't.

Anon, my poverty in science is my own, but has nothing to do with my religion, which has never seen itself as being in conflict with science. I cheerfully admit to admiring science from afar more often than not, if that makes you happy.

Still, I'm amazed at all the scientists popping up here to say that scientists never, ever, ever say that religion is silly or doesn't exist because of its non-empirical nature. I'd love to take you at your word, but unless you're prepared to show me evidence from a double-blind peer reviewed study of the matter, I'm afraid I'll have to dismiss it as anecdotal.

Yes, I'm a Christian. I'm also inclined to think that people who read this blog are generally intelligent enough to understand that a sentence which reads "...between religion and science...when science claims..." etc. refers to people who hold religious or scientific notions (or both!), not some Abstract Principles Dressed Up and Conversing.

Clearly I was wrong, not about the general, but about the particular--but if you think I'm going to dumb down my writing to satisfy the inability of some extremely pedantic types to grasp metaphor, you really don't know me.

And Connie, people say "Christians believe the Earth is 6,000 years old" all the time, without clarifying that some Christians do while others do not, or identifying the specific Christians who believe this. Sometimes "Evangelical Christians" is written instead, though not all who describe themselves as Evangelical Christians agree that the Earth is 6,000 years old. Amazing that the rest of us Christians don't tend to have conniptions when this is done, isn't it?

In the Catholic elaboration on the Genesis story, Adam and Eve were created perfect, in form and in spirit. They were perfectly rational, perfectly in control of their bodies, and immune to disease and death. They started out perfect, and became imperfect by their own free choice. Only after that did any creatures die or any conflict occur.

According to the scientific evidence, human beings developed from animals and lived as animals do, eating other animals, occasionally fighting among themselves, not perfectly rational, not in perfect control of their bodies, not immune to disease or death. There's no room in the evolving ecology of Earth for a time when God infused a soul into two primates and they became even temporarily perfect and free from conflict. There is no evidence of any time when people and animals did not die.

These two stories can't both be true in the same way--not because mean scientists don't want them to be, but because they are mutually contradictory. I don't hate religion, and I'm not saying that origin myths are useless. They may be useful as teaching stories, models of how humans understand ourselves in the world--in short, as myths. The pseudo-Darwinian idea that "Nature" is teleological and is working toward a goal of promoting the emergence of a superior species is a myth, too. But any scientist could tell you that.

As far as my opinion of the evolution/creationism debate goes, I believe that the account of the creation of the world in Genesis is at once allegorical and literal. Allegorical in the sense that it is intended in part, I think, to demonstrate the fact that all that exists was created by a loving benevolent God ("and he saw that it was good"), that the conflict between good and evil has existed since creation (separating the light from the darkness), and that God lies outside of time and space, for even the psalmist has said "for a thousand years are like yesterday in His sight" - and yet we have here the entirety of creation springing into existence as if in six days, yet it appears to us as if billions of years.

I also believe that it is scientifically accurate, provided that it is interpreted in a certain way. In this I agree with Hugh Ross, whose explanation of Genesis 1 can be found (cached) here: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:Orwlb6KwnD4J:www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/testablecreationsummary.shtml+http://www.reasons.org/resources/apologetics/testablecreationsummary.html&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1

mdavid:
It's clearly not literal, but the message is obvious to any reasonable reader. You can't have it both ways: you say humans are too smart and understand to world too well to believe in God, otoh you demand a divine text to read as a science book and yet have no poetry to touch the heart? Please.

No, it's anything but "clearly not literal". You have plenty of intelligent believers and nonbelievers who think it conveys a literal meaning. But even if it isn't, I must ask, where do you draw the line? What parts are literally true and what parts mere poetry? By what standard do you make this distinction?

Can't have free will and goodness at the same time.

I think God could have made his point about human sacrifice a lot sooner w/o tampering with free will. At any rate, I don't see how this kind of "faith" qualifies as any sort of divine succour. If anything, it's the exact opposite.

You don't understand me. My point is that man simply is not smart enough to even understand the world we live in, let alone grab for the infinite and try to explain the motives of God.

If the motives of God are beyond our understanding, how do we know that they're good? How do we even know they're motives of God in the Christian sense of the term. On your own terms, it's impossible.

I don't do science based upon a popularity contest.

Collins is the head of the genome project. I'd say he's more than qualified to make this kind of call. At any rate, given that we have evidence of jewelry-making from tens of thousands of years ago, it seems rather arbitrary (if not perverse) to argue that that those humans had no soul. So we're still stuck with the quandary I outlined in my first post.

Once again, my point is that we simply can't, as you claim, prove or disprove anything about God from science.

Well, if you'd read my original post, you'd see that I don't disagree with this. What I said is that God's existence seems very improbable given what science shows us, and to claim his existence requires one to fall back on God's ineffability, which is exactly what you've done.

M_David is correct when he states that we last shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees approximately 5 million years ago, but culturally and linguistically modern human beings may have only arisen as recently as 50,000 years ago. We've only been anatomically modern homo sapiens for about 250,000 years, at most. See: Nicholas Wade's Before The Dawn

Seems to me as a Roman Catholic that there is a tremendous amount of work for our theologians to do in this century, not just defending what has been said before in the apologetics style but really forging new ground. But what may theologians think/write without trespassing on what some Pope, Church Council, Doctor of the Church or just vaguely "the tradition" has said? I have no objection to philosophy or theology's relying on deductive reasoning which I see as their main difference from the inductive reasoning of science, but I do object to Christianity's, particularly Catholicism's, painting itself into a corner for all time with deductive thinking, logic, based on an historically conditioned interpretation of Scripture by mainly ancient and medieval writers.

If , for example, we could only admit that we just don't know when and how and under what circumstances humanoids got to be really human and how they, were it a pair or a band, somehow blew it, with dire results for all their descendants none of whom could survive infancy and the effects of social contact and it's moral contaminations without dying within at best a few years of birth. Actual sin we know and see all around us. And that's all we really know as empirical fact. But theories and deductions and speculations we must make about historically unknowable facts to support our ideas which we declare as God-given Truth.

Why, thank you, Erin. I think it takes one to know one, so--right backatcha! ; )

Derek Copold,

Collins is the head of the genome project. I'd say he's more than qualified to make this kind of call.

Not the kind of call you are making. He would be the first to point out that he's merely speculating how humans looked and acted by that date. Which, again, tells us zero about what we are talking about: when humans got a soul, if they did. Heck, it doesn't even tell us at what point humans could no longer breed with chimps. Why isn't it possible that humans has some sort of a snap injection of the soul even when they were dumb as chimps? Why can't dumb people have souls? I think they do today.

that God's existence seems very improbable given what science shows us

You (or science) hasn't shown anything to demonstrate this. Zero, zip, nada. You've just made this "improbable" part up. It's arrogance for a finite person living in a limited point of time and space to claim some part of the non-material world is "improbable" unless it contradicts something in the material world.

Based on the data at hand, it's simply hard to ignore that humans think and act as if they were more than mere material creatures - the vast majority of humans have a strange reflexive urge to worship. That's certainly not proof of God, but it leaves the question open, and once again, I've never heard of a single atheist who actually lives like he's an atheist. These are hints that there might be something non-material going on here.

However, I don't do what you do, and henceforth demand that this constitutes some sort of scientific "probabilility" that God does exist. They don't. I merely acknowledge that the question remains open from a scientific point of view.

and to claim his existence requires one to fall back on God's ineffability, which is exactly what you've done.

That's not what I've done. I'm not "falling back" on anything, but having an open mind. I'm not doing what you are and snickering, "Atheists are falling back on God's ineffability!". Silly. I've simply said (and say) that the scientific data is inconclusive, and all we know for sure is that humans are very weak minded compared to the complexity of the natural world. Thus, it's logical to keep an open scientific mind about non-material things.

On a sidenote, I second Jaybird's recommendation of Before the Dawn. I wore the library's copy out and finally had to buy my own...

Oh dear. I was going to stop arguing and rest on my laurels, but now I'm curious to see how this Hugh Ross person gives a "scientific explanation" of Eve's creation from Adam's rib. I'm not an expert, but my somewhat cursory study of biology has led to the conclusion that probably females are the default version, and it's males who are the mutants. The continuing shrinkage of the Y chromosome has led some biologists to conjecture that males may not be around forever, either. There's certainly no way that the male could have existed before the female in the world of evolutionary biology as we know it. So how does that square--scientifically--with the claims of male primacy embedded in the Genesis story?

There is something very bizarre about people who think we are just cosmic accidents, trying so hard to prove their irrelevance. This is one evidence for the Divine. We want to MATTER, so much. Even if we outwardly pretend that we don't. Humans deep down don't want to be just cosmic accidents. "I'm not really a materialist, I just play one on T.V."

"Clearly, Official Science In All Its Glory is far too wise and humble to say (could it speak) that evolution disproves the existence of God. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused." Erin

Clearly, you should apologize. You should apologize for selecting this topic, thus subjecting yourself (and those above-board readers who have the ability to reason and inability to continuously suffer disinterment of the usual mendaciousness) to the rationalization of why some folks choose to live in degradation and licentiousness.

Macro evolution=no God=cover for certain life styles. Ho hum.

But, it must be admitted, Franklin Evans made me smile when he said, "I have just one thing to add: Mdavid, ya gotta admit that some of those numbskulls can be vastly entertaining. ;-)"

Looks as if the spam filter is not working too well.

Thanks, Erin. It looks as if you got all of them.

Mdavid:
"In the end, if we say the material world explains everything, humans ain't much. But I can't help but notice that most people don't live this way: they live life as if it matters, as if love and the lives of the people around them are more important than that if we were mere carbon lined water bags. These so-called materialists are living in denial of their own theories! Not exactly encouraging for their theory, since they clearly don't believe it themselves."

But if the illusion that life matters has a breeding advantage in a Godless universe, isn't that what we would expect? That people would be bred with the illusion of meaning? You might be able to see past it intellectually, but not emotionally.

I believe that God made the world and everything in it; I believe that He directly created the souls not only of the first two fully human creatures on Earth, but that He continues this act of direct creation of the souls of every human being in existence. In other words, the human body may have been formed by evolution, but the immortal soul of every human being is not something which developed naturally, or exists as a naturally occurring characteristic of the material existence of humans.
posted by Erin Manning @ 9:00am

This is interesting. I'm searching what is the Orthodox teaching about soul now. I haven't found any definite theaching about how soul of each person appears in this world. It is accepted to be a mystery, but still some saints believe that each soul is created by God directly (St.Kliment,St.John, Ephraim Syrian), others believe that soul appears from souls of parents the same as body (Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Macarius Egyptian. Our russian monk-starets Ioann Krestyankin, so much resembling Dostoevsky's Zosima, also thought so). If i'm not mistaken they believe that God is father of every living soul on earth because He created Adam and Eve and told them to multiply and inhabit Earth. I.e. not as direct creator of each soul but as the first cause of human life on Earth. That seems to be in accordance with first pages of the Bible where it is written that Adam and Eve were created on the 6th day and they were the last creation on this planet.
And if every new soul created personally and had nothing to do with souls of parents, then how would one explain inheritance of original sin? That would have been unjust for the new creation. Existance of original sin makes sense only if souls of newborns originate from souls of parents, doesn't it?

And by the way admitting that theory must make people realise that connection with ancestors is very important. Not only prayers for parents, grandparents and forefathers and their prayers for descendants matter. Sins and spiritual achievements of our ancestors influence us, as our sins and achievements will affect our descendants. Sometimes i wish i had at least one righteous forefather to pray for me, and several times in life it seemed to me that someone prayed.

Well, Eric, maybe I'm holding the horse's tail, but from my perch between God made the soul and science cannot prove it, I have no conflict with either side.

I experience "soul", both internally and with others. If I stay with this experiential approach, validating my observations and reactions in the moment, I don't need to prove anything. Others experience it as well. Their perceptions -- indeed, the ways in which they attempt to describe their perceptions -- vary widely. I don't need one or more others to independently see "soul" exactly the way I do.

So, I have little difficulty sharing with others on just about any level. I tend to have richer and deeper conversations about it with those who take a spiritual perspective, than I do with those who insist on a scientific approach. But that's the way of the world, and I find it quite acceptable. ;-)

meh

But if the illusion that life matters has a breeding advantage in a Godless universe, isn't that what we would expect? That people would be bred with the illusion of meaning? You might be able to see past it intellectually, but not emotionally.

Sure. And we do see this to some extent with the low birth rates of people who don't believe in God.

My only point is that both sides - believers and non-believers - have no leg to stand on via science. The question remains open, and it's a beautiful thing, real free will. You either seek God out or not.

Lies, I deleted your most recent comment. As you can see from the fact that I've left "Someone's" comment up, I'm not terribly sensitive or thin-skinned. But your attack on Rod, who isn't even here this week, was over the top and not at all conducive to courteous discussion.

"And if every new soul created personally and had nothing to do with souls of parents, then how would one explain inheritance of original sin?"

How have you been, masha? If you really want to examin that topic, go here: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11312a.htm

Cleveland: "How have you been, masha? If you really want to examin that topic, go here: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11312a.htm"

The short answer: Nobody really knows but there is no shortage of handwaving opinions. It's dogma, not logic: One either believes it or not. If one is not pre-inclined to believe the dogma, one is unlikely to accept the arguments. Even many who accept the dogma admit the arguments can seem a bit dodgy.

Razib from Gene Expression on engaging theism and engaging Creationism:
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/06/engaging_theism_engaging_creat.php
"I happen to personally accept both of these assertions:

1) A scientific world-view entails atheism

2) A scientific world-view contradictions Creationism

That being said, as matters of debate & discussion I think the former is an open question, while the latter is not an open question."

"as you correctly point out, atheistic science declares a wide open question a closed question."

Razib pointed that out, that's a quote from the link.

"A true scientist, Einstein kept an open mind because he knew that the "why" and "how" questions had not been answered, and saw the undeniably super-natural design in the universe."

Einstein did not see "the undeniably super-natural design in the universe".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/may/12/peopleinscience.religion
"Einstein penned the letter on January 3 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind who had sent him a copy of his book Choose Life: The Biblical Call to Revolt. The letter went on public sale a year later and has remained in private hands ever since."

"In the letter, he states: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.""

"...everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe--a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive." Einstein

You go from that to Einstein seeing undeniably super-natural design in the universe? It seems like a stretch to me. And Einstein was wrong that He does not throw dice with quantum randomness. He does! So much for Einsein's apprehension of so-called "super-natural" design in the universe.

Heh, I'm going to go off on a tangent with your Charles Krauthammer link with a Steve Sailer reaction to Krauthammer's claim about Newton:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2005/11/sir-isaac-newton-was-one-weird-dude.html
|
|Sir Isaac Newton was one weird dude
|
|Charles Krauthammer claims:
|"Newton's religion was traditional. He was a staunch believer in |Christianity and a member of the Church of England."
|
|Actually, economist John Maynard Keynes's 1936 purchase of a trove of |Newton's private papers at an auction opened the door to Newton's |mystical side, which was unorthodox in the extreme. Newton spent an |enormous amount of the first half of his life engaged in "Bible Code"-|style attempts to discover the secrets of the universe by deciphering |the secrets God had embedded in ancient sacred writings.
|
|Keynes wrote that Newton "was the last of the magicians... His |deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic... Very early in |life Newton abandoned orthodox belief in the Trinity... He was rather |a Judaic monotheist of the school of Maimonides."