What if someone told you that God told them He used evolution to create the world?

reply to post by EarthEvolves


I would suspect any person claiming to be in direct communication with God is having a mental breakdown, but I also don't see evolution as proof there is no 'creator'. And as far as I understand it, neither did Darwin OR the Catholic church... But even the athiests who believe purely in this 'accidental' evolution idea, have no answer for what STARTED it all... how did we get from 'NO LIFE' to 'LIFE'? ... Personally I DO believe in an intelligent designer. It just doesn't feel 'true' to me that a microbe burst into life form NOTHING and then evolved into a bacteria, then into a fish, then into a lizard, then into a monkey and then into this being that can paint masterpieces, write concertos, create telephones and rockets that can fly people to the moon and ALL by some meaningless and purely accidental series of causes and effects

reply to post by EarthEvolves


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What if someone told you that God told them He used evolution to create the world?

1 - I'd really question if someone had heard directly from God on this matter.

However -

2 - I'd totally believe that God would do that. He moves VERY slowly. It would make sense and it would fit with His M.O. on how He does things. SLOWLY ....

reply to post by EddieCusak


Wow, a lot of people keep saying this?

It makes me sad. So many people believe it is impossible, or even insane to communicate with God?

I'm far from mentally broke down, and I communicate with God often, and like I said before, when I am inclined to intently listen, I ALWAYS get a response. I have a feeling God is always responding, but my level of listening is only rarely up to the task of hearing the response.

I've heard it said that praying is talking to God, and meditating is listening to God. I think that is pretty accurate, although it doesn't take dedicated meditation, it just takes that same level of focus.

I have had God speak directly into my head. It isn't words, it isn't English, it is just something you didn't know before, and now all of a sudden you just know it. It isn't your own imagination, because sometimes I disagree with it. On one of the occasions, and I've written about it on ATS in detail before, but I had an internal argument, I didn't like the conclusions I was suddenly reaching, it was an argument with God.

It makes me sad that so many people seem to think it is impossible to talk to God, or that someone must be crazy to hear God's response.

reply to post by Darkstar74


The Bible HAS been altered. If let's say you're a certain group, and you want to confuse people, wouldn't you want to change one of the first parts where instead of 4 billion years old, you say the Earth was created 6000 years ago, and then hoping that we would never be able to test that?

reply to post by rigel4


If let's say you want to run a simulation, do you interfere with it, every time you see a result you don't like, or you just run it without any variable affecting it? Think about this for a sec, how different would your life be, if you knew "for sure" that God exists? Basically, all of your actions now are pretty much guided by the fact that you want to "go to heaven," not because you want to be good. Essentially, it would end your free will.

Also, God does not have to be perfect. There are no rules that say he has to be perfect. All that's required is whether he has the capability to create or even program the universe or not.

Originally posted by np6888
reply to post by rigel4

 

If let's say you want to run a simulation, do you interfere with it, every time you see a result you don't like, or you just run it without any variable affecting it? Think about this for a sec, how different would your life be, if you knew "for sure" that God exists? Basically, all of your actions now are pretty much guided by the fact that you want to "go to heaven," not because you want to be good. Essentially, it would end your free will.

Also, God does not have to be perfect. There are no rules that say he has to be perfect. All that's required is whether he has the capability to create or even program the universe or not.

Well then does that make humans gods? (or at least getting closer all the time to becoming so). We can alter weather, we can create new species, we can clone, we can get into space, hell....we can even create a new type of DNA.

I always rather liked the idea our universe was a cell in something's body - all a matter of perspective! That said, that is not what i believe.....

Originally posted by np6888
reply to post by rigel4

 

If let's say you want to run a simulation, do you interfere with it, every time you see a result you don't like, or you just run it without any variable affecting it? Think about this for a sec, how different would your life be, if you knew "for sure" that God exists? Basically, all of your actions now are pretty much guided by the fact that you want to "go to heaven," not because you want to be good. Essentially, it would end your free will.

Also, God does not have to be perfect. There are no rules that say he has to be perfect. All that's required is whether he has the capability to create or even program the universe or not.

I think I agree with you, but I've read your post a couple of times and it almost contradicts itself?

I know God to be real, but I don't expect God to be perfect. I don't believe God interferes in our lives, but I believe it is there as a resource to be tapped into, if we are ready and willing. I am not motivated by heaven or hell, and I don't believe those exist, and I also do not believe any innate "good" exists either. I think good is a relative term based in organized religion and civil laws, it is not a Godly term.

Actually, it seems I am the one that contradicts myself.

And yes, humans are also gods, but we are not the creator. It is our purpose here to realize how godly we are, and to experience as much as possible from this carnal existence, and to use that experience to evolve on a spiritual level, and maybe one day we will know god.

reply to post by EarthEvolves


which god are we talking about ?

Did God make you?
Did God manufacture Hydrogen?
Did God exist before consciousness?
Is God's will absolute and in tablets of stone, or can he change his mind?
Is God's will subject to the whims of man (Gay Rights, Female Primates, Education of Women etc)
Did God create the Galaxy and the Universe? Wow that's impressive,
What about the "possible" Multiverse? What about the room the multiverse is in? the building? the street? the exo universe and the muilti-exoverses down the road? What about the stuff surrounding all of that? Amazing .

To my Budgie (Humphry) I am God, He thinks I made the world, He doesn't even know he was born of his mother. So will just assume I created him and everything else-little bird brain.

If a man came back from the heavens on a craft omade of light would he be God? How could you tell? What if he was with another guy, what if he was called Allah? would some of us be dissappointed? Damn I backed the wrong horse.
Would you be certain it was God?, if he had free fish and bread, if he could make a road in the water-well maybe.
That would definitely be God would it? I'd hate to get that wrong, it'd be rude for a start. and I'd like to be ready..

See, the problem with me is I don't know for sure and I have to be certain. its a big question so it should be answered properly.

As soon as you get to stuff you don't know about, the answer has to be God.
Basically Science can ask How and why a million times and the answer comes back God as soon as Science fails. "aha this is proof. Science has no answer -ergo there must be a god."

No, people are stupid we can't even see we are wrecking the planet like parasites let alone figure out how to succeed as a species. (A successful species does not bring about its own demise through resource scarcity) even our best scientists are head scratching. People are stupid and do not know everything so our science fails currently, this does not prove God.

God=I don't know
Intelligent design=IDK (because you haven't grasped how evolution actually works, its a buzz word that God invented. Right.

You can phsically see evolution happening. Its been known about for long enough to be observed in rapidly changing amphibiens placed in different environments. The more complex the organism, the greater the generational periods, the more constant the environment, the slower the process.

No one knows where all of this came from-even the staunchest religious person who feels he is closest to God (I wonder what the Pope would say?) cannot say for CERTAIN that all of this came from God because he can't even know what all of this is or where it ends. You can "think" you can "trust" it but you cannot "know" it, it is based on faith...trust...and distinct from knowledge.

It is nice to have faith and trust in something-it gives us hope but knowledge, fact and technical advancement will give us the answers if we ever get that far, and it may lead to other questions or answers we don't want to hear that may or maynot disprove God.

Science and God are not enemies Science may oneday prove God (Hubble sees guy that looks like jesus at edge of universe) hmm maybe not, but for now we have faith.
The way we are going we may never "know" how this all came to be. Those that say otherwise are using faith over knowledge or must have a way of travelling at vast multiples of C.

But it shouldn't stop us looking to "the heavens" to find our origins, others like us, or God.

OK. So, "good one" is a good thing, no?

Originally posted by Sablicious

Originally posted by EarthEvolves
What if someone told you that God told them He used evolution to create the world?

I'd respond the same way I respond to all godtards and their feeble attempts to incorporate ailing theology into a modern, free-thinking world:

OK, but presumably certain Biblical figures had communication with God. The Jewish Moses, the Christian Jesus, and the Islamic Mohammed are all subjects to truth claims of that nature. What would make this hypothetical Prophet any different? This is, after all, a Thought Experiment and thus a certain amount of license is permitted.

Originally posted by EddieCusak
reply to post by EarthEvolves

 

I would suspect any person claiming to be in direct communication with God is having a mental breakdown, but I also don't see evolution as proof there is no 'creator'. And as far as I understand it, neither did Darwin OR the Catholic church... But even the athiests who believe purely in this 'accidental' evolution idea, have no answer for what STARTED it all... how did we get from 'NO LIFE' to 'LIFE'? ... Personally I DO believe in an intelligent designer. It just doesn't feel 'true' to me that a microbe burst into life form NOTHING and then evolved into a bacteria, then into a fish, then into a lizard, then into a monkey and then into this being that can paint masterpieces, write concertos, create telephones and rockets that can fly people to the moon and ALL by some meaningless and purely accidental series of causes and effects

You must strike a nice pose doing that!

In any case, I cannot get to all responses but it has been interesting. Why do people assume that this is a literal scenario as opposed to a thought experiment?

Originally posted by lordbayfin
reply to post by EarthEvolves

 

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Since I will be leaving ATS soon, I want to say a few words. For one thing, I realize that I am more often than not a little gruff. I felt that I needed to be tough in order to survive as a Jew and someone who is a Social Democrat in this forum among right-wingers and Ron Paul'ists. I felt that I needed to be strong, and I was. I might have pushed things too far. I am not so much apologetic as reflective. Don't get the wrong idea...push me and I push back. This is my way of expressing some regret but at the same time I am glad I held my own. If I pushed too far in some cases, I do apologize for that.

My religious views are not the reason for my being here. This was intended more as a thought experiment to get people to think. I will share this one thing. I believe that the Creator made time cyclical. That means that cycles return. I know one thing about December 21, 2012. It is secret knowledge...that the next day will be December 22, 2012 LOL! OK, time is cyclical, but not fully, and I am not here to promote 2012. Time is more helical than cyclical in my view anyway. I believe in Return, but not a literal return of the past. I believe that what was will be, but the form changes. Herclitus meets the Mayans, perhaps. Cycles return, but you still never step in the same river twice.

Evolution does not contradict my spiritual beliefs. Or, at least it does not contradict them as I understand them. I believe that evolution is key to the unity of life. It is not about competition or selection at the ultimate level (although those play out biologically). Cyclically speaking, I believe that the Pleistocene will return in some form. It won't return exactly as it was, but it will return in some sense. Native Americans call it the Fifth World, while my own faith believes in a "Messianic Age" in which the balance of Nature is restored (Isaiah 11:6-9). Neither of these *QUITE* correspond to the modern paleontologists conception of what the Earth would be like if the Pleistocene returned, in particular Isaiah's concept of vegetarian predators. Again, a lot of my understanding rests on an adoption of an adapted form of Hegelianism that departs from Statist German philosophy but keeps the idea of the reconciliation of opposites. How that plays out will be a learning experience. I can hold beliefs that seem contradictory because I know that my mind is not the All Mind, and that I do not hold certainties.

In my view, the State, the ultimate expression of the Anthropocene, also the ultimate expression of Right Hegelianism, believes that it has vanquished the Pleistocene. The Return of the Pleistocene will happen, I believe, precisely when the State believes that it has ultimately triumphed. GMO crops, surveillance, population regimentation like the kind that the eugenicist Netherlands Royal Family seems to be promoting:

www.rnw.nl...

see related stories:

www.guardian.co.uk...
news.yahoo.com...

and other expressions of the Global Panopticon are predicated on the subjugation of Nature leading to its ultimate climax, the domestication of the human race. The return of wildness, the rewilding of Nature, happens in the nick of time to defeat those plans. It is really our release as well as the release of the planet.

This is not a scientific theory. Hence, I have no need of null hypothesis, evidence, peer reviews, and...he, he...no need of funding from anyone. I do not even need to crowd-source. I know that I cannot manifest anything to prove what I am saying, and you might dismiss it as wishful thinking. I do know that Nature is rearing her head again. The buffalo are returning, just as the Indians. The Wolf still lives, as does the Bear. Even Washington D.C. sees coyotes now, which is astonishing if you think about it. It is not only the liberation of Nature, but of humans also. John Zerzan meets Isaiah? Well, maybe not. But, at the very least I believe we will see Nature defying our ability to control it, which will be for the ultimate good in my view.

A poem on the subject of the return of wildness:
www.aspiesforfreedom.com...
I called myself "Nasa Shill." Some of you think I am...

I'm just going to cut to the chase here. The Creationist-Evolutionist debate is nonsensical. To me, it's quite simple. Evolution is the method the creator, whatever that force may be, used to create. Neither side wants to admit it because it would be admitting that they are both wrong in a sense.We all know that that is a major problem in this world, everyone wants to be "right." Let me ask everyone a question. How can everyone be "right," when everyone is oh so wrong?

I believe in both god and evolution as well. its no more of a cop-out to say that god uses the natural process of evolution then it is to say that god doesn't personally fart out every wind and go drag the sun across the sky every day. Its self evident that creation has mechanisms that are self sustaining. The rise and fall of life forms shouldn't be any different.

Interesting note. Darwin was in some ways a military veteran. His voyage aboard the Beagle was not just as a naturalist purely and simply. He bore arms for the British Empire, which at that time backed America's hegemony in Latin America and the Monroe Doctrine. It is interesting to note because it is part of the social history of Victorian capitalism and its subsequent use of certain Darwinian memes.

Darwin also suffered some of the psychological damage of his experiences, just as veterans do today. Instead of going Rambo on everyone, he did it through quiet desperation, which is the English way (Pink Floyd). The death of his daughter profoundly affected him. He suffered profound distress during the years after his voyage on the Beagle. Darwin's meditations on the nature of suffering were profoundly philosophical, and helped to shape his particular view of selection. In a sense, seeing life as a whole made it possible for him to accept individual suffering, including his own. (Including also the suffering of factory workers, a whole other debate that deserves the complexity of not being dragged in to a "religion versus science" fracas that often comprises the least sophisticated arguments on both sides.)

Darwin as veteran deserves comment because the traumatic suffering of war, one that would have affected someone who left the medical profession because he did not like blood, may have made him unwilling to consider the question of how life differs from inorganic processes. The idea of the Cosmic Spark in life might have seemed too alchemical for him, too much a part of the older way of thinking. But, even more to the point, once one accepts the idea of a spiritual dimension of life, then the philosophical question of evil becomes pressing. Even the idea that we are fallen sons of Adam cannot explain evil because God must have created Adam with a nature to chose the wrong way, foreknowing that he would fall. It was simpler to accept life simply as a chemical process that would one day be explained. But, over a hundred years later, while evolution has been verified as fact over and over again through fossil and DNA evidence, the idea that life can be explained due to accident has not only not been verified, but is even more of a problematic assertion now with our knowledge of the complexity of DNA than it ever has been.

Whatever one's views on evolution, at least remember that Darwin was a veteran of the British Empire. This means that he saw some degree of combat. All who see combat deserve compassion. Whether the cause was right or wrong, they deserve compassion. Modern moralists are often very self-righteous, and have little of the sophistication of thinkers of centuries past. Darwin thought about religion intensely. He rejected it, perhaps, but he thought about it much more than modern believers. I respect him for that.

Originally posted by SpeakerofTruth
I'm just going to cut to the chase here. The Creationist-Evolutionist debate is nonsensical. To me, it's quite simple. Evolution is the method the creator, whatever that force may be, used to create. Neither side wants to admit it because it would be admitting that they are both wrong in a sense.We all know that that is a major problem in this world, everyone wants to be "right." Let me ask everyone a question. How can everyone be "right," when everyone is oh so wrong?

The debate really isn't nonsensical. It's usually quite logical from the scientific standpoint. The problem is that creationists are often very irrational and very often post up lies and fallacies about evolution and science, when they haven't actually done an ounce of research on the topic. God and evolution are perfectly compatible, but when creationists try to "debunk" modern science it simply shows they have more faith in a book than in god. It's really just the bible literalists that bring this primitive mentality of absolutism to the table and selectively reject fields of science that don't fit the bible to a T. Most creationists are rational people, but this section by its nature attracts the fundamentalists that won't listen to any argument other than their own. It's not about being right or wrong, it's about acknowledging science and faith for what they are, and that's something that most refuse to do. Many people confuse science and religion, claiming science is faith or their religion is science, but that's not true at all.

Here is my thoughts.

I don't think anyone should believe anything anyone else tells them in regards to God that they cannot find out for themselves. If someone tells you God told them, I would be VERY weary of them. If you have your own connection with the creator, then the best bet is to ask God for yourself. Look at what a person does, something that is divine, will show through how they handle themselves and what they do in the outside world. The fruits of a persons life help to show if they are truly in tune with "God". And that doesn't mean money.


Now, I personally believe that evolution is the creators way of creating perfection. Things evolve to changing conditions and adapt to their environment, and to me, that is the most perfect thing ever. Perfection in motion, always changing to keep up and be as perfect as possible.....I never have seen a conflict between religion and science in this respect, in fact, I have never seen science to conflict with the creator, because everything to me, is a part of the creator, so science and spirit go hand in hand in my book. But that is just what I believe to be. Did god tell me this? No, observation and experience have. Could I go out and claim God told me this? Sure, but it would be a lie.

I live by my signature.

"If you have your own connection with the creator, then the best bet is to ask God for yourself."

What does your connection with the Creator tell you?