Did Satan’s fall occur prior to and precipitate the Big Bang and formation of the material universe, with evolution, animal suffering, extraterrestrial intelligence, and man?
Yes. Didn’t you get the memo?
No, but he is the General Manager for Pan-Galactic Suffering, and the Assistant Director of Natural Selection. So… “responsible for evolution”, NO; more like “process owner” of a specific mechanism, with supervisory responsibility shared among Steering Committee members.
I’ll try and find the org chart for you.
Wow, so it turns out that everyone is right! That works out rather well.
Someone claiming to be a theological expert(yeah right) told me that “As the Prince of the Earth”, Satan had the power to put fossils, dinosaur bones etc. into the Earth for the express purpose of debunking Christian theology with scientific evidence(billion year-old bones). Seems like it would be a clever move and well within his power, if you believe in that sort of thing…
What say you?
Prove that Satan exists, then we’ll discuss what he may or not be responsible for.
Evolution, maybe. Celine Dion, defintely.
I disagree with MC Master. The blame for that one lies squarely with Canada. 
Seriously though, you can make up an unprovable theory for pretty much anything if you so choose. I could theorize that God caused evolution and wanted us to discover it, and Nonsaints was sent here by Satan to lead me astray. You can’t really prove me wrong, can you?
So instead of beleiving everything I can’t directly prove or disprove, I think I’d rather beleive in the physical evidence that I can.
By the way, has anybody else gotten the offer for 50% off the MacGod for OS X yet? Have they worked out the bugs from MacGod 9.3? It was such a pain when my screen would catch fire and start talking.
No, Satan’s fall did not come before the Big Bang and everything was created, because he had to have a Heaven to fall out of.
So his fall came after Heaven, the stars, and the Earth and clouds were created, but before homo sapiens was created, since he was in place in the Garden of Eden when Eve met him, so he had to have been created during one of the previous five days of creation, Man being created on the sixth day, so anyway he was created after the Big Bang but before homo sapiens, which puts it at about 100,000 B.C.
And, of course, Evolution was already up and running by that time.
Whoops, I’m wrong. Satan was created on the Sixth Day, after all.
So Satan is probably included under the category of “creatures that move along the ground”, and anyway Man was the last thing God created. So Satan had to have been created before Man.
I’ve always been open to the idea that there is a higher intelligence who may have played a role in the course of evolution, but Satan is purely a mythological character and has no place in even highly speculative scientific discussions. Sorry.
A convenient idea in one respect (in that it provides and unfalsifiable get-out-of-old-earth-arguments ticket), but ask this person if he/she is comfortable with the idea of Satan (the destroyer) as a creative force.
—I think Heaven (since it is God’s abode) is eternal, Duck.—
Sure you don’t just mean that it’s an actual infinate?
Hmm… DDG, your latter “corrected” hypothesis only really applies if Satan was created AS The Snake to begin with,no? If OTOH, we follow the more classical vision of Satan as a fallen angel who came into Eden under the guise of The Snake, then he was created whenever the angels were created, and Genesis 1 tells us nothing about when that happened.
Also, since the Big Bang and the evolution of life are creative phenomena, they can only be caused by the Creator (in Christian cosmology, that is).
I have read Judeo-Christo-Islamic folk and literary stories, preachings, and theological specs that place the rebellion and fall of Satan quite late in the process, at the time that God starts giving consideration to the creation of Man (or even shortly after creating Adam), when the theretofore Archangel disagrees not only as to where he would stand in the cosmic pecking order, but as to what was to be the ultimate fate of the physical world and its new creature, Man. So this would mean that the rebellion takes place after the universe’s evolution is underway, sometime in the 12+ Billion-year range between Event 0 and the rise of Homo Sapiens as a species, when Satan decides he knows better than God how it all is supposed to go.
I say that smacks of pure Manichean Heresy, nothing more than a survival of Roman and Greek Zoroastrian Mystery cults into the Early Church.
The concept of a Prince, (Lord) of This World goes back to Agri Manu, counterpart and adversary to Ahura Mazda, Lord of Light and was indeed used by Christian preachers to argue against the scientific evidence of evolution.
Most christians and muslims credit Satan/Shaitan the power to tempt and subvert believers .
Only The Creator can create, and that little punk ain’t The Creator!
Martin
**johndcal wrote:
Did Satan’s fall occur prior to and precipitate the Big Bang and formation of the material universe, with evolution, animal suffering, extraterrestrial intelligence, and man?**
IIRC, the whole story of Satan and his fall are from the non-canon texts of Hebrew scripture, it’s purely mythology. It has no bearing on the real world except in terms of myth and metaphor. It’s like saying the story of Hansel and Grettle is a case of actual child abuse.
Only if he created time after he created the heavens. After all The first line in the bible (King James Version) is “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. 
Just being facetious Lib, I am sure you know the real truth since you don’t have to stick to translations like I do.