Board index ‹ Creation and Evolution

[Cat Mat]

Why would God, a perfect Creator, create flawed humans to have a relationship with?

[jimwalton]

God is, by definition, uncreated. Anything created, therefore, is not God and is less than God, and therefore susceptible to mistakes. They're not flawed, they're just not God.

There is no indication in Genesis that humans were created perfect. A lot of Christians even believe in evolution, including human evolution. God guided the process of evolution, and when people had actually become human, that's when he invested them with a soul and revealed himself to them. But we're not to be under any illusion that they were ever perfect. The whole idea is that they (we) always needed God. We were never sufficient without him.

What God was offering in the Garden of Eden was the chance to do life right.

[Cat Mat]

Thank you for this great response. I believe my question has been answered.

[Lucky]

Born. Created. What's the difference?

And if there is a difference, are any of us created? These word games are always so confusing.

[jimwalton]

Oh, they're not word games at all. Jesus existed eternally, since he was God. He was born on the earth (incarnated) as a human, but that was not the beginning of his existence. The difference is that we humans are born (created) as the beginning of our existence.

[I love cake]

So god isnt real. Huh. Well that doesn't sound very christian to me.

[jimwalton]

You baffle me with this response. God is certainly real. What I said is that God is uncreated (unlike the universe, which had a beginning about 13 million years ago, the Earth, which has a beginning about 4.5 billion years ago, and humans, that first appeared on the Earth about 200,000 years ago). God is eternal, he is uncreated, and he is perfect. He's very real.

[Cake Lover]

If something has no creator it isn't existing. So the earth is older than the universe too?

[jimwalton]

> If something has no creator it isn't existing.

I would like to see the logic behind this claim, because I'm not sure there is any. Please elaborate. If you admit that the universe or matter or energy always existed (meaning, no creator), then you are claiming the the universe or matter or energy don't exist, which would be a very odd claim. I can't imagine you're going in that direction. But if you're claiming that the universe, matter, and energy didn't always exist, then something which existed before them brought them into being. You need to elaborate on your claim.

Something had to have always existed. Even before the Big Bang scientists are speculating that possibly energy existed. What caused the Big Bang? It is still speculated, but something did, which means something existed before everything else existed.

A philosophical argument reasons that there had to have been a First Cause—something that had no creator, something that kicked the whole thing into gear, something that caused everything else.

> So the earth is older than the universe too?

No, the universe is thought to be about 13 billion years old, the Earth is thought to be about 4.5 billion years old, according to our current scientific understandings.