Everyone ratchet back the hostility.
Figure a way to discover how and why you are talking past each other and then address the issues on the same level rather than simply dismissing the intelligence of your opponents.
[ /Moderating ]
Interesting conversation, but confusing the way people keeep arguing past each other. Can I attempt a summary?
Blake’s position: That according to RC theology, God, at some point, gave a hominid species souls, which enabled them to develop, over time, characteristically human levels of self awareness, artistic ability, introspection, etc.
Sentient Meat’s position: That animals, and later hominids developed these characteristically human traits gradually through the process of evolution. There is no one species, or individual of a species, that is clearly and markedly different in these traits from its parents. If God did ensoul someone, it had very little noticeable effect, which means that it wasn’t a very significant act.
Furthermore Sentient Meat is satisfied that the available evidence supports his position on the gradual evolution of human traits. Blake thinks that he has not adequately demonstrated how he determines who possesses what traits.
Is my summary at all accurate? Am I following this conversation? If so, I have a question for Blake.
Blake do you have an opinion, or guess, as to when in the evolutionary timeline RC theology might say the act of ensoulment took place?
Thanks Weedy - your summary of my position is pretty accurate. In your summary of Blake’s position, however, the phrase I bolded (‘over time’) is crucial.
A few pages back, he posited that the single, specific divine act endowed people with “all the characteristics of man as we know them: self awareness, artistry, speech and so forth”. If he meant that the act didn’t endow people with all such characteristics at that specific time, but was instead responsible for said characteristics gradually appearing later, he really should have said so.
This divine act which keeps granting characteristics over an extended timescale is something which he has only introduced in his most recent posts. It is also something which I happen to agree doesn’t conflict with the physical evidence since it is so feeble a ‘miracle’ that it produces no detectable difference at the instant of its initialisation compared to the case in which it is completely absent - it is no longer impossible given the evidence, merely utterly unnecessary. The less feeble the divine act at the time, the more it comes into conflict with the timeline of human development.
Yes, accurate again. I simply do not see how evidence like ritual burial and cave painting says nothing about traits like self-awareness and artistry, despite them admittedly not furnishing direct evidence regading the advent of very specific sub-traits like poetry and introspection.
It is possible that the cavemen never left the Garden of Eden, and are in paradise already.
Jesus came to restore all things, as such yes cavemen and animals will be in the restored ‘earth’ aka new earth, Kingdom of God, though heaven refers to the domain of angels.
To which cavemen do you refer? Is it only homo sapiens, or were there neanderthals in the Garden of Eden as well?
More to the point, would there be caves in the Garden of Eden? Grottoes, maybe.
Grottomen.
Merely discussing the illogic. What the hell is forgiving about an eternity in flames for a minor transgression? God is certainly not forgiving but ruthless.
Well, maybe not entirely ruthless…
I’m not Roman Catholic but I am Christian and agree with the Catholic position on evolution so I will attempt to answer, I personally think it was the homonid species where sentinence was gained.
That gets us back to the whole issue we were discussing. Back about six million years ago, there was a population of critters who were the ancestors of both us and chimps. Then around that time, the populations split up, and one population gradually evolved to become modern chimps, and another population gradually evolved to become modern humans.
So right after the split happened, the two populations were nearly identical. Now imagine taking just the one that eventually led to humans. Was the ensoulment right then? Like there were two almost indistinguishable populations of apes, one with souls and one without?
The sentience thing didn’t happen all at once - it gradually developed over millions of years. When exactly did God decide to grant souls to them?
When they reached the sentinence of human beings to-day, perhaps Homo Habillis? I’m not an expert on biology or evolution.
SPELLING BEE PRACTICE TIME!
Sentience.
Only two “n’s”
Also only one “l” in habilis.
Do you think it’s a problem for the theory if there is two groups of virtually identical apes, one with souls and one not? It seems like you don’t think that’s fair, or something, but maybe I’m reading you wrong.
That’s exactly what he’s saying. What else would he mean?
I don’t know what he means, but I don’t see how ‘fairness’ comes into it, or how anyone knows enough about the event to know if it was fair or not. Just because two people look identical to us, doesn’t mean they do to God. Or even if they are identical, why is it unfair that one gets a soul and the other doesn’t? To put it another way, who is it unfair to, the one without a soul who can never get to Heaven, or the one with a soul, who now risks eternal damnation? Besides, God often seems unfair to human eyes, and there are plenty of places in the Bible, where we are told not to think we can judge better than God. So what CurtC said doesn’t make any sense to me, which is why I asked him what he meant, because I don’t understand.
Let me get this straight- one caveman has no soul, so his existence is snuffed out completely once he dies. Another caveman has a soul, but he ends up in hell because he had no way of even knowing what a soul is, let alone that he had one, let alone what God’s new rules are. Hell must be populated by many people who arrived there as a result of God’s hidden purposes.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that Islam chose the correct God. You theoretically had the choice to adopt Islam, but this was extremely unlikely because you were brought up in a Christian society. Your punishment for following the wrong religion is eternal damnation- but oh well, *we can’t judge better than God, * right? What makes you more right than the Muslim who makes this argument?
If you say so. I don’t know who goes to hell and who doesn’t, or what God’s purposes may be.
(If you are assuming I am Christian or a believer in hell - I’m not)
If one of those arguments is right, then it’s right because it’s true. If I say dandelions are purple, and someone else says they are yellow, what makes them more right than me?
I’m not sure, but I think Allah decides who enters Paradise based on deeds rather than beliefs. You can also start off in Hell, and get moved up later. So it might be better to be a non-Muslim caveman than a non-Christian.
That’s fine, but all I’m saying is that any God who sends people to hell to serve some greater purpose operates on a level that is abstract to the point being of absurd. If that’s the case, then why should we bother even trying to understand God, much less make him happy?