Wow! lissener, that was a great analogy.
I especially liked the caveat about teenagers. . . :smack:
Sorry if the OP wasn’t clear enough. I try to write like Hemmingway but wind up writhing like James Joyce.
By non-literal interpretation of the Bible I mean believing that God created Adam though not in exactly six days if evolution is to be believed.
In Genesis God has a direct impact upon people until Jacob. From then on God does not speak directly to Man (In the beginning : a new interpretation of Genesis , Karen Armstrong.)
Perhaps it could be put this way, who was the first man God spoke to? What attributes would this Adam have? How had he evolved enough to warrant God speaking to him? He had something in common with Abraham but not in common with his (Adam’s) father.
Was this recongnizion conscienceness? Did conscienceness evolve before the breakdown of the bicameral mind?
Ah, I see where you’re coming from, now. If you’re relying on the book, keep in mind, Jaynes postulated that consciousness effectively replaced the “voice of god”. Until the breakdown of the bicameral mind, people interpreted the voices in their heads as god talking to them. With consciousness, the voice would be recognizable as the self.
. . . which may all be a lot of hooey (a technical term).
I’m trying real hard to enter into this discussion in the proper spirit; assume Adam was a real guy, the first to become aware of God as “other” and as the source of all norms.
But then I get to thinking about the “Fall”, and all it’s ramifications, and my head starts to hurt. So I retreat back to my tried-and-true, “it’s metaphor. It’s a story that explains the condition of mankind in his relationship to the creator.”
Now I feel much better.
AcidKid:
From what we know now, the human brain has not changed in any substantial way for at least 50k years. So, the 4k year timeframe just doesn’t fly. Also, there is theoretically no reason why the mtDNA Eve had to be a member of the species Homo sapiens. Had our species not gone thru an evolutionary bottleneck, it’s quite possible that Eve could’ve been a Homo erectus female (or one of the Erectus-like species).
Juilian Jaynes’ book (Origin of Consciousness…) is an interesting read, but I don’t know of any biologists, psychologists, or anthropologists who think he is correct.
Um, I haven’t read the book, but where does she get that God didn’t speak directly to anyone after Jacob? Plenty of the prophets claimed to hear the voice of God.
Sorry, I wasn’t very clear. Jaynes does not assert that God did not speak directly to anyone. He speculates that the “voice of god” may have been a bi-product of the supposed communication between the disconnected halves of the brain (paraphrasing liberally - it’s been a long time since I read the book).
Jaynes had no opinion on prophets and such after the development of consciousness - just not part of his hypothesis.
I love it when “open-minded” people can say in one breath “I don’t believe in religions and dogmas and anything that tells people they are wrong” and “if you don’t believe in evolution you either a dumbass or worse”. Very nice.
Lissener and rimshotgdansk
It’s not a good analogy if you’re arguing for MACROevolution. You started with a language and you ended with a language. You should’ve started with a language and ended up with a hammer in order to show MACROevolution.
BTW, evolution is not the same as Darwinism/Natural Selection. Darwinism is a form of evolution, there are others.
** rimshotgdansk**, Skammer, was writing about Karen Armstrong’s book Genesis Revisted, not about The Origin of Conscienceness.
Skammer, don’t have a copy of the book in front of me so I can’t give a direct quote. Did these prophets speak directly to God or was the message brought by an angel such as the case with Mohammed? Karen Armstrong may of written only about Genesis because if I recall correctly God did speak directly to Solomon.
John Mace, The Origin of Conscienceness was interesting but not necessarily true.
I mentioned it more to get the discussion on the right track than as a statement of fact.
Can you recommend a book for the terms “mtDNA” and “evolutionary bottlenectk”?
I edited out a paragraph where Adam could of been a mammal who saw the demise of the dinos. That might of been stretching it somewhat. But no, no reason Adam has to be a homo sapien
The book you mentioned in your OP, The Journey of Man would be a good one. The Seven Daughters of Eve would be another.
mtDNA: Mitochondrial DNA-- the DNA located in the mitochondria of the cell, inhereted only from the mother.
Evolutionary Bottlenck: When a species is reduced to a small number of individuals. Results in significant reduction of genetic diversity. It is theorized that Homo sapiens numbered only about 10k individuals somtime around 75k yrs ago.
I love it when “open-minded” people can say in one breath “I don’t believe in religions and dogmas and anything that tells people they are wrong” and “if you don’t believe in evolution you either a dumbass or worse”. Very nice.
Heard that.
Evolutionists have more faith than I do. I just don’t have enough in me to believe we got here randomly.
Religion and science have little to do with another, and it is entirely possible to be a theist and to accept evolution. There are biologists who are Christian and evolutionists. Of course, if one insists on believing the Adam and Eve story as literal truth, one is going to encounter difficulties in embracing the scientific outlook.
I also qustion the use of quotation marks in the quote I excerpted., I never said those things nor did anyone else in this thread; if Rodrigo is attempting to put words into my mouth, then he is being purposely dishonest.
Nothing random about it. That’s not to say that it has purpose, but it acts in understandable and testable ways. I would urge Snoopyfan to educate herself by reading books on evolution–The Beak of the Finch, by Jonathan Weiner, or Evolution, by David Burnie, to get an idea of what evolution is. It’s no shame not to know, only to refuse to learn.
> There appears to be good evidence that Native American’s were present
> in North America long before that. Maybe that’s why Christian settlers
> felt it was OK to massacre them as they weren’t “family to God”.
Actually, that’s pretty much an accurate picture.
Evolution is our life force. Our continued existence. It is not at odds with a creator. This is the old, “did G-d put the pot on to boil” or “did the pot put itself on to boil”. Why don’t you thing G-d used evolution to create us? That’s hardly random.
Well, how about starting with a rock? It’s easy enough for MACROevolution to cause one population to end up with a hammer.
Interestingly, it would be easy enough for a different population, 500 miles away, to start with a rock and end up with an axe.
And then there would be a third population, another 500 miles away that starts with a rock and ends up with a mortar and pestle.
Or any of a thousand different products.
And then someone comes along, who’s never heard of evolution and holds up a pendulum in one hand and a pane of glass in the other. He would be dumbfounded if you told him that both products evolved from one common ancestor.
I’m sure he couldn’t even begin to imagine what kind of strange device could spawn a pendulum, glass, and a hammer! He’d say you were crazy for even suggesting such a stupid thing.
Yet, we know better, don’t we?
> Evolutionists have more faith than I do. I just don’t
> have enough in me to believe we got here randomly.
Evolutionists have the faith to believe that, given enough time, anything and everything will eventually happen purely by randon chance.
Creationists seem to have a different kind of faith. They believe that everything has a very specific reason for the way it is and that there is some grand and unknowable master plan that covers everything everywhere all the time.
Unfortunately, neither theory is provable. In the first one, we don’t have enough time to examine and record everything. In the second case, the master plan is pre-defined as being unknowable.
<sigh> No, he shouldn’t’ve. Macroevolution is not fish transforming into apes, or any other nonsense that creationists of all stripes seem to think it is. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: at least try to understand a concept before you criticize it.
Macroevolution is a large-scale view of evolution. What determines differential survivability of species? How do novel features arise? How do new taxa “arise”? That sort of thing. Underlying this entire view, at the micro-level, is the steady action of natural selection.
The language analogy works perfectly well: how does one language transform into another? At what point did the ancestral tongue of modern romance languages become “English”, or “French”, or “Spanish”? How did the transformation between languages occur? Clearly, it did occur, and it had to occur gradually, from generation to generation. Just like how birds can evolve from dinosaurs, or whales from terrestrial animals.
And, this is incorrect, as well. Those who study evolution realize there are limits to what it can do, and that, as already pointed out, the process is not “purely by rando[m] chance”. We may have the “faith” that grand changes can occur given sufficient time, but that is a direct consequence of the evidence that sufficient time has, indeed, passed, and further evidence that many small changes can have profound effects. That, and the mounds of evidence that natural selection operates as advertised. The whole “belief” requires as much faith as that required to believe the sun will rise tomorrow.
Just for the record, English is not a Romance language. It’s Germanic. (Unless by “ancestral tongue” you meant Indo-European.) But otherwise, your post is correct.
But would a moral code of right and wrong be enough? It could be argued that animals have a moral code even more developed than humans. Animals, other than man, fight over territory but not to the death. The code of the pack could be interpreted as a moral code.
I was targeting the larger Christian audience. Let’s say I believe in a literal Koran. Angels are made from light, Jinn are made from fire (not heat), and Man is made from a clot (earth.) The prophet Adam is mentioned in the Koran. Muslims do not discount evolution because of scripture, in fact there is the basis for arguing that scripture supports evolution.
Let’s combine religions into these assumtions:
God created Man (Adam) through evolution.
God spoke/interacted with Adam just as God spoke with Moses and Abraham.
When during the evolution of Man did God create Adam?
Or, could both theories be true?
Did God make final adjustments on evolution.
Did God make a final adjustment in the form of his presence?
When did this creation in the midst of evolution occur?