What A Scientist Learns From A Southern Baptist Seminary

That’s because of our complexity, the dominant species of the planet. How did we attain our amazing symbolic/artistic/ scientific/technological/cultural capacities? What’s their full significance? Why have we always been a religious species? Are we qualitatively or just quantitatively different to other species? And yes, we do share so many instincts and patterns of behaviour with the other ‘great ape’ species. Our patterns of behaviour have led to definitions of human nature. It’s from a religious perspective that such definitions aren’t sufficient. So yes, agree to disagree!

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Defining fully human is entirely arbitrary. Upright walking is a human trait going back millions of years. Just like human rights of today, it is an entirely arbitrary construct. My point is that humanity didn’t have to wait for some book to tell of some arbitrary God creating humans in its own image. It was the other way around, humans in cultural societies created God(s) to suit its purposes of agency.

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This may be too far off-topic, but do scientific and theological concepts of “human” ever meet up? The definition I thought to suggest is the earliest form of Homo with a mind that could hold the concept of God. This runs into problems because it excludes very young children who’s brains are not yet fully developed.

Maybe it’s better if we pretend I never asked? :wink:

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Great questions.

Turns out that there are some scientific categories that have reasonable correspondence with particular theological ideas. But on both sides of the fence, there is usually a lot of debate about what exactly is the right criteria to use. So it isn’t that surprising that some of the ideas correspond.

One example of correspondence is scientists “full theory of mind” and “symbolic thought” are both pretty close to the philosopher’s definition of “rational minds.”

Of course parsing out the nuances is a bit of a challenge.

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