Don’t assume that all Christiand and Jews are of one mind on this. I doubt if even a majority of Christians believe the creation account in Genesis is meant to be taken literally.
Don’t assume that all Christians are fundamentalists…
Keeps wondering if he’s been whooshed or not
Unless you mean that the above is reference to a kind of afterlife which implies the existance of God.
I’m thinking you answered your own question here :).
I don’t call it “having a soul” either, since I’m atheist–I’m just pointing out that the story of the tree may correlate well to this aspect of evolution.
I’m not sure why you claim that “we are more complex not more moral.” Do you admit that we are more capable of making a moral judgment than a rock is? Than a cactus? A paramecium? A termite? A salmon? A cockatoo? A rat? A chimpanzee?
Let me know if you answer any of these questions in the negative, and I’ll ask more follow-ups. TO me it seems obvious that humans have a qualitative difference from other species in our attitudes toward good and bad. This isn’t to say that we are, in any meaningful sense, BETTER than other animals: it’s just one of the things that makes us unique. Elephants have got a unique nose; we’ve got a unique brain.
Daniel
No–just me being snarky and observing that an observation like “various scientists who were determined to prove the existance of God through Science(or Specifically, Mathematics)” has a pretty good chance of turning this thread into yet another five-page discussion of a certain ontological proof.
Daniel
Great OP - is something I’ve been meaning to ask too.
One thing I consistently heard at my church was that JC’s resurrection was a physical event, in order to counter the physical death brought into the world by the Fall.
The main passage used was 1 Corinthians 15, where it’s not at all clear if Paul is speaking about spiritual death, or physical death (or both).
The consistent interpretation I was given is that this is not just a reference to the spiritual death of the “soul”, but that it deals with actual, blood ‘n’ soil, “real” death in a physical sense.
If you accept that interpretation - ie. that physical death entered the world with Adam and Eve - then evolution presents major problems.
If you assume that it’s spiritual death that’s being referred to, many Christians I’ve met worry that this means JC’s resurrection was merely “spiritual”, which takes away some of the “realness” of it. The reasoning goes that you’re then only one step away from the “conjouring trick with bones” or similar.
Is there good and bad ? Did we invent good and bad ? Is your good my bad ? Unique we may be… but we make ourselves seem better than we really are.
I agree that we are different and unique from animals. I just don’t like branding this difference as “soul”, “morality” or “moral superiority”. Being a fellow atheist I guess you understand that.
I also like to recognize that we are similar in many other ways, that when we put ourselves on top of some silly pedestal its dangerous… lest we forget where our impulses and ways come from.
I think you’re misunderstanding what I’m saying. A capacity to make moral judgments does not make one morally superior. Consider that Augusto Pinochet is capable of making moral judgments, but my six-month-old cousin is not; does that imply that Pinochet is morally superior to my cousin?
My own capacity to make moral judgments–to partake of the Fruit of Knowledge, metaphorically speaking–does not reflect on my own moral status; it merely enables me to judge that Pinochet is a right bastard for what he did, whereas my cousin is not. Kim Jong-Il is capable of making the same moral judgment as the one I’ve made; his ability to make that judgment about Pinochet doesn’t mean that he’s better than me, or even that he’s better than Pinochet.
I’d personally say that Pinochet and Kim Jong-Il are morally inferior to a dog or an elephant or a gerbil or a goldfish or a chunk of granite. The two despots have a negative moral value, in my opinion, whereas everything else mentioned has a neutral moral value.
This correlates with the story of Adam and Eve. When they eat of the fruit of knowledge, it’s not described as elevating them above God’s creation: it’s described as The Fall. It is precisely our capacity to make moral judgments that leads to our suffering.
I think it’s a pretty cool metaphor for the evolution of the moral instinct in humans.
Daniel
Crap, meant to respond to this specifically. Whether “good” and “bad” have objective meanings is irrelevant to my schtick: I’m not talking about the existence of good and bad per se, but rather about the existence of an instinct unique to humans that identifies behavior as good and bad.
Furthermore, a difference in this instinct between you and me does not disprove its existence, any more than a difference between us in language disproves the existence of an instinct for verbal communication in humans.
Finally, whether or not an instinct for morality would make us morally superior does not in any way affect the existence of such an instinct. Either we’ve got it or we’ve not got it. The scientific way is to make our conclusions based on the facts we can observe, not to decide on our conclusion first and then reject facts that disagree with it.
Daniel
Sorry… you weren’t implying moral superiority… it was more of a open comment against the prevailing view of human superiority.
I agree with your points… I was just trying to reinforce the idea that we are different… but not that much. Which would kind of support Evolution vs humans coming from some Divine origin.
Fair enough–but my motive here is to remove the Creationist’s motive for opposing natural selection as a theory. I think that even within their story, if it’s viewed metaphorically, its underlying message works.
And while humans share more in common with other animals than most folk admit, our ethical framework seems to be something unique to us, in the manner that I described above. We may not be able to function well in boiling water, and we may not be able to track prey by scent, and we may not be able to soar on thermals all day without getting tired, but we sure can make abstract judgments. And for that, we got kicked out of the Garden, so to speak :).
In other words, evolution does not negate God.
Daniel
I’ve not read all the posts on this long thread, so I might be repeating something but…
as far as I know the Roman Catholic Church now officially believes in evolution - they probably learned from the Galileo debacle not to disagree too forcefully with widely held scientific theories…
I also think this somewhat negates the traditional idea of original sin etc etc but I think many Christians would now say that Genesis is a metaphor for how, somewhere along the line, humans fell out of favour with God and became rebellious and in need of Jesus to set them right again. How this is pinned down with no defining event I’m not sure, but religion isn’t all that good at logic anyway…