DNA - belief destuction

by donkey 85 Replies latest jw friends

LittleToe

In best Beavis and Butthead voice: "Hehe, hehe hehehehe snarkkk - you said suppository!!!!"
Midget-Sasquatch

FunkyDerek: Nice explanation of why "Adam" and "Eve"didn't necessarily have to hook up.
But I get your drift LittleToe, so you might like pondering over the chromosome counts between humans and other primates. All the great apes apart from humans have 24 chromosomes (24 paternal + 24 maternal). There's a pretty good case for human chromose 2 being a fusion of two of those 24 chromosomes, resulting in our set of 23. (they found matchups in banding patterns)
Usually when you have gametes (sperm and ova) with unbalanced numbers of chromosomes (like 23+24), it results in less fit offspring. It would hinder successful reprodcution. But if both the male and female had 23, the line should easily take off. That's one very likely factor in the speciation of humans from other primates. So along the lines of your other question: When did those two hook up?
Now I admit I haven't kept up to date since I graduated, so I defer to FunkyDerek or others who might have more recent info that could reinterpret/correct all of the above.
a Christian

Derek, You wrote: A lot of the Genesis account has to be dismissed as false if taken literally. If you decide it's figurative, then you can say that it may be true. But that's it. .... The question is why would anybody do this? Genesis was written nearly 3,500 years ago. I believe it was written to be read by billions of people over the last 3,500 years and by billions more people in future centuries. If it had been written as a literal account of creation with enough specific scientific details to prove to 21st century readers that its author must have been inspired by God, what would readers in the 5th century B.C. have thought of its contents? What would readers in the 5th century A.D. have thought of its contents? What would readers in the 15th century A.D. have thought of its contents? If the writer of Genesis had written his account of creation to match our 21st century understandings of when and how the heavens and the earth came into being, if in the next 500 years some of our 21st century understandings are replaced with "new improved" understandings, what would 26th century readers of Genesis think of its contents? My point is that if Genesis was written in a literal way, with enough accurate scientific detail to satisfy you today, it's contents certainly would have been rejected by past generations as being "scientifically inaccurate," according to their understandings of science, and its contents would probably also be rejected by generations not yet born as being the same. I believe Genesis was written as it was in order to provide general information sufficient to answer "origins" questions asked by people living in all generations, past, present, and future. However, at the same I believe Genesis provides enough accurate scientific detail to satisfy readers with a knowledge of 21st century science. For instance, Genesis uses the Hebrew word for "create," Bara, only in describing God's bringing into existence the heavens and earth, life in the sea and mankind. All other kinds of life, vegetation and animals, Genesis tells us, were not directly "created" by God but were "produced" by "the land." (Gen. 1:11,12, 24) And, as I mentioned earlier, Hebrew lexicons tell us that "Bara," Hebrew for "create," refers to "the initiation" of something, while the Hebrew words translated as "produced" refer to "the fashioning of," or "the changing shape of," preexisting materials. These things being so, I believe Genesis chapter one clearly allows for the possibility that God used evolutionary processes to create all life forms on earth. You wrote: According to your take on things, the events in Eden actually only demonstrated that two human beings - no, facsimiles of human beings - fell for a trick played on them by two vastly superior beings. No, the events in Eden demonstrated that all human beings are capable of sinning, and are thus all less righteous than God (God can't sin), and are thus all undeserving of eternal life. For if Adam and Eve could sin, all humans can sin. Adam and Eve were used by God as representatives of the entire human race to demonstrate the fact that the entire human race is sinful and undeserving of eternal life. If I want to demonstrate that all rabbits are capable of breathing all I have to do is get one rabbit to take a breath, and my demonstration will be a success. I don't have to get every rabbit on earth to take a breath. For simple logic tells us that if one rabbit can take a breath all rabbits can do the same. You say I make Adam and Eve into "facsimiles of human beings." I do not. Adam and Eve were human beings in the same way that all human beings have been human beings. They have each individually, at the time of their births or possibly at the time of their conceptions, been given an eternal spirit from God. Gen. 2:7 tells us that "The LORD God formed man [Adam] of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and he became a living soul." The Hebrew word for "breath" here carries a much greater meaning than just Adam's lungs being filled with air. The word means "spirit" and "divine inspiration." As such, Christians have always understood that God at this time made Adam much more than an animal. We have long understood that God "created" Adam by giving him an eternal spirit which at the time of his death would not "go down into the earth" like "the spirit of an animal" bit would "rise upward" and "return to God who gave it." (Eccl. 3:21; 12:7) Having an eternal spirit given to us by God, a spirit which will survive our death and then return to God, is what makes us human. It is what made Adam human. It is also what made men before Adam human. When God created the human race, before His creation of Adam and Eve, I believe He did so by then giving highly evolved primates eternal spirits, spirits which at the time of their deaths would not "go down into the earth" like "the spirits of animals" bit would "rise upward" and "return to God who gave them." I believe this was the creative act referred to in Gen. 1:27. These things being so, Adam and Eve were not "facsimiles of human beings." They became human beings in the same way all human beings before them had become human beings, and in the same way all human beings after them would become human beings, by being individually given an eternal spirit by God. Simply because Adam and Eve were not physically related to the humans who came before them did not mean Adam and Eve were not human. Just as the fact that all human beings who came before them were physically related to lower animals did not mean that they were not human. The Bible's definition of a human being (sorry JWs) is a God given spirit, aka a "soul," living in a physical body. I wrote: Because of our unrighteousness we do not deserve to live forever. We deserve to die. You responded: Because of the unrighteousness of two pretend humans, you mean? ... Because of the "sins" of two facsimiles of humans, God condemned their descendants and the real humans to death. No, because of our own unrighteousness. The Bible clearly tells us that God will hold each one of us responsible for his or her own unrighteousness, not for Adam's. (Romans 14:10-12, 2 Corinthians 5:10) And it says that we all need the forgiveness God offers us through Jesus Christ, because we have all personally "sinned" and have all personally "fallen short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) Paul accurately referred to Adam when he wrote, "By one man's disobedience many were constituted sinners." (Romans 5:19) To "constitute" means "to establish formally." Adam's disobedience formally established the fact that the human race is less righteous than God and thus undeserving of eternal life. So, Adam's disobedience also formally established the fact that God had justly withheld eternal life from people who lived before Adam and would be just in withholding eternal life from Adam and Eve, from all their contemporaries, and from all people who would live after them. I wrote: However, God sent His Only Begotten Son into this world to pay the penalty for our sins, to die in our place. In order to have God forgive all of our sins, and to be given eternal life by Him all we have to do is truly accept what He has done for us. You responded: To atone for this sin, he had another facsimile of a human killed. Jesus was no facsimile. He was a human being in the same way we are. Christ's body contained a God given spirit which returned to God upon His death.. (Luke 23:46) You wrote: For this atonement to take effect, we have to believe without evidence that this is the case. I have never met a Christian who "believes without evidence." All believers will tell you what convinced them that the story of scripture is true. Some will tell you of answered prayers. Some will tell you that their personal study of the Bible convinced them that it is God's Word. Some will even tell you of some miracle they have personally witnessed. I became personally convinced that the Bible is God's Word through what I consider to be strong evidence. However, the evidence which has convinced someone else may very well not convince you. I believe God gives everyone who is willing to believe in Him and who is truly seeking Him all the evidence they need to put their faith in Him. If you are such a person, and you have not yet found such evidence, I believe you will You asked: Would it not have been possible for God to use parables and fables that corresponded more closely with reality? Could God have done a better job of having the Bible written? Better to convince you maybe. But what would now be better for you may not have been best for all readers over the past 3,500 years, and for all other generations of people yet to be born. I wrote: But since we know mankind has been on earth far longer than 6,000 years "context" tells us, if the Bible is God's Word, Adam could not have literally been "the first man." You responded: That's not context. It's not even "context". It's a contradiction between the text and observed reality. Of course, when I spoke of "context" I was referring to the greater context, the context of all we know to be true.
donkey

A Christian,
So God went to all the trouble of "creating" Adam and Eve, but already knew he was building a failure? If you know up front that you are building a house that has a fatal flaw - how are you not responsible for the outcome?
If god knowingly constructed a flawed human society then he would be at fault. You cannot have it both ways.
Another question: All these folk that lived before or parallel to adam and eve, did they benefit from Jesus? Those who died before Adam - did they have sin? What code was used to measure the sin?
From what I am seeing you are trying to think out side the box but staying firmly in the box.
seattleniceguy

Wow, I just have to say, the placement of a Christian's post right after some really good posts from funkyderek and Midget-Sasquatch was a really awesome juxtaposition of science and religion. As science is providing real answers to interesting questions, religion continues its boring rehash of the same tired concepts.
Secular humanism for me!
SNG
a Christian

Donkey, You asked: So God went to all the trouble of "creating" Adam and Eve, but already knew he was building a failure? Adam and Eve did not fail. They succeeded in doing what God created them to do. He created them to clearly demonstrate that human beings are all sinful creatures and, as such, are all undeserving of eternal life. You asked: If you know up front that you are building a house that has a fatal flaw - how are you not responsible for the outcome? You are responsible. You wrote: If God knowingly constructed a flawed human society then he would be at fault. He was at fault. That is why He couldn't hold our sinful nature against us. For He created us all as sinners. And that is why He felt obliged to pay for our sins, "with His own blood." (Acts 20:28) As I think I have said before, the only way the story of Adam and Eve makes sense is to understand that God not only knew how things were going to end up in Eden, but that He deliberately set the whole thing up to make a point. What point? This one. If Adam and Eve in paradise, without a problem in the world, could not manage to obey one simple command from God, what chance does any human being have of living their entire trouble-plagued life without sinning either in word, thought or deed? No chance at all. That is the lesson that was illustrated in Eden. Human beings have a sinful nature. A nature which God Himself gave us.

Why did God give us a "sinful" nature? Because "God is love" He wanted to create people with whom He could have a loving relationship. But since true love can be neither forced nor programmed, in order to have loving relationships with us, God had to create us as free people. Free to choose to love God and His ways or to not love God and His ways. In other words, free to do both right and wrong, free to do both good and evil.

Because we can do wrong and often do, and because God can't do wrong and never does, we are less righteous than God. And because we are, none of us deserve to live forever. That means all human beings have, in effect, from their births been condemned by God to die. Not because of anything Adam did, but because we ourselves all fall short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23)

So, the need for Christ's sacrificial death really had nothing to do with Adam. God knew He was creating a sinful race, a race of people who would not deserve to live forever. But like many loving parents, God wanted to give His children more than they deserved. So before God created the first "sinful" human being He devised a plan for our salvation, a way for Him to offer us much more than we deserve, a way for Him to give us eternal life as a gift, without violating His own extremely high standard as to who deserves to live forever. God's extremely high standard: "The wages of sin is death." The gift God wants to give us: "The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." (Romans 6:23) The way God devised to give undeserving, sinful people this gift: "Christ Jesus, who gave Himself as a ransom for all." (1 Tim. 2:5,6) Notice that the Bible tells us that Christ, "gave Himself as a ransom for all," not just for Adam. It also tells us that before Adam, or any other human being, ever existed God knew that He was going to create a "sinful" race of people who, in order to be given eternal life, were going to need a redeemer. For Peter wrote, "You were redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. He was chosen before the creation of the world." (1 Pet. 1:18-20) But how could God consider only one death, a death which only lasted from Friday afternoon until the following Sunday morning, to be as precious as many billions of human deaths, deaths which would last forever? He could do so because He considered the three days of life which His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, gave up to be more valuable than many billions of eternally lost human lives. Why? Because God knew that Jesus Christ was far more than a human being. God also knew that Jesus Christ was far more than "a perfect human being," or "Adam's equal" as JWs like to call Him. God knew that Jesus Christ, as His only begotten Son, was also God. And because Jesus Christ was God, His Father considered His death, and His three lost days of life which followed His death, to be worth far more than many billions of eternally lost human lives. You asked: All these folk that lived before or parallel to adam and eve, did they benefit from Jesus? They will. Because of what Christ did for all mankind, "A time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear His voice and come out." (John 5:28,29) "This will take place on the day when God will judge men's secrets through Jesus Christ." (Romans 2:16) I believe at that time God will judge the hearts of all who have ever lived and died without hearing the Gospel of Jesus Christ as though they had heard it. In other words, God will know how they would have reacted to the message of God's plan of salvation if during their lives they had heard it preached. Jesus Himself said that some of the men of Sodom will be judged with mercy because if they had heard Christ's preaching they would have repented. (Matt.11:23,24) You asked: Those who died before Adam - did they have sin? What code was used to measure the sin? There are two kinds of sin. First, the sin of "falling short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) Since "all unrighteousness is sin," (1 John 5:17) and we are all by our nature less righteous than God, we are all born "in sin." (Psalm 51:5) The pre-adamic human race was guilty of this kind of sin, "falling short of the glory of God." Second, there is "the sin by breaking a command, as did Adam." (Romans 5:14) The Bible tells us that this kind of "sin is not taken into account when there is no law." (Romans 5:13) So the pre-adamic human race was not guilty of this kind of sin. However, since all sin results in death, the fact that pre-adamic men did not "sin by breaking a command, as did Adam," in practical terms, made no difference to them.
funkyderek

aChristian:
I believe it was written to be read by billions of people over the last 3,500 years and by billions more people in future centuries.

I know that. I'm still unable to figure out why.
If it had been written as a literal account of creation with enough specific scientific details to prove to 21st century readers that its author must have been inspired by God, what would readers in the 5th century B.C. have thought of its contents?
They would presumably have thought it was inspired by God, as they did anyway, without any evidence.
If the writer of Genesis had written his account of creation to match our 21st century understandings of when and how the heavens and the earth came into being, if in the next 500 years some of our 21st century understandings are replaced with "new improved" understandings, what would 26th century readers of Genesis think of its contents?
This is interesting. It seems to show you have a typically religious view of science, as something that changes constantly and unpredictably. The earth has been around for 4.5 billion years (give or take) there was no global flood 4000 years ago. All life on earth is descended from a common ancestor. These are facts. Barring supernatural revelation, these facts will not change.
My point is that if Genesis was written in a literal way, with enough accurate scientific detail to satisfy you today, it's contents certainly would have been rejected by past generations as being "scientifically inaccurate," according to their understandings of science,
Not at all, because their understanding of science was largely based on their unquestioning acceptance on the Bible as the word of God. Had it said something completely different, they would still have believed it. Their beliefs, like yours, were based on faith, not evidence.
I believe Genesis was written as it was in order to provide general information sufficient to answer "origins" questions asked by people living in all generations, past, present, and future.
And yet, clearly it does not do this, despite your belief.
However, at the same I believe Genesis provides enough accurate scientific detail to satisfy readers with a knowledge of 21st century science.
I'm really at a loss as to why you believe so many things that are palpably untrue.
For instance, Genesis uses the Hebrew word for "create," Bara, only in describing God's bringing into existence the heavens and earth, life in the sea and mankind. All other kinds of life, vegetation and animals, Genesis tells us, were not directly "created" by God but were "produced" by "the land." (Gen. 1:11,12, 24) And, as I mentioned earlier, Hebrew lexicons tell us that "Bara," Hebrew for "create," refers to "the initiation" of something, while the Hebrew words translated as "produced" refer to "the fashioning of," or "the changing shape of," preexisting materials.
Would it have been grammatically correct to use "bara" when referring to making something from dust, or was the word used the only one that could be used even if it was intended to mean that God made all living things directly?
These things being so, I believe Genesis chapter one clearly allows for the possibility that God used evolutionary processes to create all life forms on earth.
If you stretch it, you can just about fit that possibility in. Reading the text as it stands, there is no indication thatr evolution was used. According to the most obvious reading of the Genesis account God made everything directly, over a period of six days. The only reason you do not read it literally is that you would then have to reject it as woefully inaccurate.
No, the events in Eden demonstrated that all human beings are capable of sinning, and are thus all less righteous than God (God can't sin), and are thus all undeserving of eternal life.
If we are capable of something that God is incapable of, surely we are superior to him?
For if Adam and Eve could sin, all humans can sin.
That doesn't follow, especially as according to your interpretation, Adam and Eve are not related to real humans. In any case, the fact that they are capable of sinning does not mean they have sinned.
Adam and Eve were used by God as representatives of the entire human race to demonstrate the fact that the entire human race is sinful and undeserving of eternal life.
By tricking them into breaking a capricious command, he declared all humans (genuine and artificial) to be unworthy of life. Why did he not pick two real humans and observe their behaviour?
You say I make Adam and Eve into "facsimiles of human beings." I do not. Adam and Eve were human beings in the same way that all human beings have been human beings. They have each individually, at the time of their births or possibly at the time of their conceptions, been given an eternal spirit from God.
Nonsense. There is no evidence that any such thing has ever occurred and even if it had, that is not what makes us human.
Having an eternal spirit given to us by God, a spirit which will survive our death and then return to God, is what makes us human. It is what made Adam human. It is also what made men before Adam human. When God created the human race, before His creation of Adam and Eve, I believe He did so by then giving highly evolved primates eternal spirits, spirits which at the time of their deaths would not "go down into the earth" like "the spirits of animals" bit would "rise upward" and "return to God who gave them." I believe this was the creative act referred to in Gen. 1:27.
So God's act of human creation (except in the case of Adam and Eve) was to take preexisting primates with large brains and give them some sort of invisible essence which is undetectable in every way? To which group of hominids did he do this? Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo habillis, Australopithicus afarensis? What about other species that were not ancestral to modern humans? Homo Neanderthalis for example. There is significant evidence that they had language and culture. Were they capable of sinning? Were they given the breath of life? Or were they just animals who behaved a lot like humans? Why doesn't Genesis mention any of this?
Simply because Adam and Eve were not physically related to the humans who came before them did not mean Adam and Eve were not human.
On the contrary, that did mean they were not human. They were not born of human parents, they never lived as human children, their personalities were not formed by experience. If they had human DNA, it wasn't a random mix of that of their parents, it was something chosen specifically by God, and the patterns in their brain were not those formed by exposure to their environment but were put there directly by God, thereby invalidating any claim that they could represent the human race in a test that God had devised. God, in this case, clearly had a conflict of interest. He loaded the dice.
Jesus was no facsimile. He was a human being in the same way we are. Christ's body contained a God given spirit which returned to God upon His death.. (Luke 23:46)
Of course he was a facsimile, probably even moreso than Adam and Eve. He may have had a human body but his spirit was that of Almighty God, who, as you have pointed out, is incapable of sinning. God pretended to die so that he could pretend to lift the pretend punishment he had inflicted on all humans due to the pretend sin of two pretend humans.
I have never met a Christian who "believes without evidence."
I have never met one who doesn't.
I believe God gives everyone who is willing to believe in Him and who is truly seeking Him all the evidence they need to put their faith in Him. If you are such a person, and you have not yet found such evidence, I believe you will
What you're describing is not evidence. It is revelation. You can call it evidence but that's just more pretence.
You responded: That's not context. It's not even "context". It's a contradiction between the text and observed reality. Of course, when I spoke of "context" I was referring to the greater context, the context of all we know to be true.
It's still not context. It's a contradiction between the text you have declared to be true and the observable reality of the actual world we live in. To resolve this, the intellectually honest thing to do would be to reject the text as inaccurate. Instead, what you do is interpret it in such a way that those parts which are demonstrably false are "figurative", thus resolving (in your own mind, at least) any contradiction, thereby allowing you to continue believing what you have already chosen to believe.
donkey

I believe God gives everyone who is willing to believe in Him and who is truly seeking Him all the evidence they need to put their faith in Him. If you are such a person, and you have not yet found such evidence, I believe you will

How can i seek that which I don't know exists? What EVIDENCE does he give?
Please say its not stuff like: "I was going to walk under the tree but I felt an urge to turn around. The tree fell down at that instant. If i had continue walking I would have been killed. That is REAL evidence".
That is the typical evidence we are given by believers in christianity and junk like Tarot an the occult. "My card said I had a brother who was sick, it was my cousin Peter but we were as close as brothers - see Tarot works!!"
LittleToe

Derek:
achristian wrote: I have never met a Christian who "believes without evidence."
Derek wrote: I have never met one who doesn't.
Yes you have
funkyderek

Yes you have
I knew you'd call me on that. I thought you believed (at least partly) based on personal revelation, though. Am I wrong?

DNA - belief destuction

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