Re: [asa] Original Sin and Genesis 3

From: Janice Matchett <janmatch@earthlink.net>

At 08:47 AM 12/11/2007, mlucid@aol.com wrote:

"It is Creation that is source of what is rational in
humans.? After millions of years of instinctive responses to
Creation (our environment) we began to evolve (be created in more of the
image of God) a response that is called condition response and it is
Creation that does the conditioning ultimately causing us to reason by
merit of the immanence of God instead of just feel."? -Mike
(Friend of ASA)

@ A "purposeful" creation,
huh?

More purposeful that humans can ever fully comprehend.

But the claim that evolution is? purposeful??
(intelligently designed)? is in conflict with modern day
evolutionary theory, is it not?

Not in the slightest.? Modern theory is not adequate to fully describe how evolution works.? The presumption of "random" selection is inaccurate in that we simply cannot yet see all the quasi-infinite subtleties (like our own behavior, in the case of epigenetics) that reveal the hand of God in our Creation.? That presumption is the only thing that conflicts and it is an artifact of human hubris that any thinking man will recognize as ordinary denial of the vast unknown as it forever looms in our future.? We'll soon recognize that what we know is permanently dwarfed by what is possible to know, at which point the holographic truth of our instinct for God will become evident and we will formalize a Bayesian presumption of its accuracy in predicting the near term character of the unknown based on our feelings of faith in God like I did in order to come up with the above perspective in the first place.

In line with (seemingly) some on this list, many claim that religions
have not successfully created a theology which allows for the role of God
in the world and yet is also fully compatible with modern day
evolutionary theory. Troster maintains that the solution to resolving the
tension between classical theology and modern science can be found in
process theology, such as in the writings of Hans
Jonas, whose view of an evolving God within process
philosophy contains no inherent contradictions between theism and
scientific naturalism.? (Lecture God after Darwin: Evolution and
the Order of Creation October 21, 2004, Lishmah, New York City, Larry
Troster

And I've come up with a Bayesian philosophy to these same ends.? A lot of people will work tirelessly to mature our current adolescent stage of science into something that can and will do the work of God on Earth.? Whether we succeed or not depends on the maturing of our practice of religion as much as it does upon our practice of science.

-Mike (Friend of ASA)

In a paper on Judaism and? environmentalism,??
Troster writes:

Jonas is the only Jewish philosopher who has fully integrated
philosophy, science, theology and environmental ethics. He
maintained that humans have a special place in Creation, manifest in the
concept that humans are created in the image of God. His philosophy is
very similar to that of Alfred North Whitehead, who believed that
God is not static but dynamic, in a continual process
of becoming as the universe evolves.

(Apologetics to New Spirituality: Trends in Jewish
Environmental Theology, Lawrence Troster)

~ Janice

-----Original
Message-----

From: Janice Matchett <janmatch@earthlink.net>

To: mlucid@aol.com

Cc: asa@calvin.edu

Sent: Sun, 9 Dec 2007 3:51 pm

Subject: Re: [asa] Original Sin and Genesis 3

At 04:32 PM 12/9/2007, mlucid@aol.com
wrote:

Seems to me to be fairly obvious
that the Fall of man depicts the rise of reason in humans.? ...After
the conditioned response became massively developed and perceptively
dominant in humans over our instinct, reason emerged.? ... -Mike
(Friend of ASA)

@ Don't we know from science that matter is
irrational. That means that it does not possess rationality and cannot
think and reason. Now when we look at the world around us, it seems that
so many species like humans can think and reason and possess rationality.
Now if Hume is right and water doesn't rise higher than its source and
an effect can't be greater than its cause, how do you get rationality
from irrationality?"

~ Janice

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Received on Tue Dec 11 13:46:39 2007