The Fall: History, Theology and Palaeobiology
Elseplace, @Alan29 said
I'm interested primarily in the first question.
Christianity has traditionally worked on a narrative whereby a perfect world with no death or sin was messed up in pretty short order by humanity pressing the "Do Not Press This Button" button. And so came death and disease and disasters and whatnot.
Unfortunately for this narrative, humanity only came on the scene (depending on your definition of human) around a hundred thousand years ago or so. And the previous three billion years of the fossil record shows death, disease and natural disasters doing their work throughout; life on the planet has gone through periods of pole to pole tropical climate and pole to pole frozen wasteland. And throughout this time organisms have lived, died, and occasionally lived long enough to reproduce. As did our ancestors, and as we do today, although we're better at surviving into adulthood than we were.
What are the implications of this for how we understand the concept of the Fall? What are the implications of our being a tiny speck in an unimaginably massive universe, our human timecales a fleeting fraction of a second in cosmic terms, for the Parousia? Will a new heavens and a new earth involve the remaking of that entire universe, all its billions of galaxies? Or is it to be understood more figuratively or more locally?
Thoughts welcomed.
Putting my big dunce hat on here ..... but doesn't any idea of redemption from original sin require the existance of a "fall" a thing for which there is no evidence at all? And if redemption is an actual thing should we not expect to see concrete evidence in subsequent human behaviour as a result?
I'm interested primarily in the first question.
Christianity has traditionally worked on a narrative whereby a perfect world with no death or sin was messed up in pretty short order by humanity pressing the "Do Not Press This Button" button. And so came death and disease and disasters and whatnot.
Unfortunately for this narrative, humanity only came on the scene (depending on your definition of human) around a hundred thousand years ago or so. And the previous three billion years of the fossil record shows death, disease and natural disasters doing their work throughout; life on the planet has gone through periods of pole to pole tropical climate and pole to pole frozen wasteland. And throughout this time organisms have lived, died, and occasionally lived long enough to reproduce. As did our ancestors, and as we do today, although we're better at surviving into adulthood than we were.
What are the implications of this for how we understand the concept of the Fall? What are the implications of our being a tiny speck in an unimaginably massive universe, our human timecales a fleeting fraction of a second in cosmic terms, for the Parousia? Will a new heavens and a new earth involve the remaking of that entire universe, all its billions of galaxies? Or is it to be understood more figuratively or more locally?
Thoughts welcomed.
Comments
I don't think it takes much imagination to think that this isn't the way things ought to be and then to desire something better.
Then we have various religious ideas about the mess and the solution to the mess.
There is a strand within contemporary Orthodox theology, with fellas like David Bentley Hart and Fr John Behr looking back to Sergei Bulgakov, Bedyaev and certain Fathers including Origen (handle with care) to develop ideas about the 'Fall' happening outside of time in some way. I'm not sure how it works.
I understand from Wikipedia that there's an Orthodox Bishop who sees the Fall and the Big Bang as contemporaneous in some way.
None of this is my field so I can only offer thoughts based on what I've skimmed online. I was never a 6-Day Creationist even in my most full on charismatic evangelical stage, although plenty of people in my church were. But there were a range of views on this one.
I'll have an attempt to put more thoughts together later but this is my two happ'orth for now.
Pass me Occam's Razor ... 😉
I tend to take these things figuratively but also see them as expressing some kind of 'reality'.
Well, Jehovahs Witness illustrations of Paradise On Earth feature images, clearly modeled on Revelation 21:1-4, of carnivorous animals co-existing peacefully with humans and herbivores. Not sure if they've ever shown wasps resting harmlessly on people's elbows, as per the query of @Alan29's student, but that would certainly fit.
I do wonder if it's only modern peoole who would read a description of lions lying with lambs and wonder if that would upend basic biology(eg. Did the lions only get sharp teeth after the Fall?) I mean, the inherently carnivorous nature of certain animals woulda been obvious to our distant ancestors as well, no?
You'd think.
What happens to lions' teeth at the Parousia?
The creationist narrative held sway in Christendom until relatively recently, and of course still does in 40% of Americans and will till Kingdom come. No misfortune - education - can befall it. I believed it for 30 years (Doh! Dur er) and it wouldn't surprise me that a large minority of adult Christian self identifiers in the UK and the rest of the anglophone world actually believe it, they certainly do in other primitive beliefs little changed since Ancient Egypt. The same will hold true in Europe. For a start.
Behavioural modernity is at least 'only' fifty thousand years old. Or eighty. Or as old as modern humans. That's three hundred thousand years. There just weren't enough of us prior to 50,000 years to leave much durable evidence.
As for being better at surviving, that's because we stand on the shoulders of those giants.
The problem only exists for the minimally academically educated. 'O' level (20% of the population) on up. The higher up you go, the more problematic it is. That problem can be headed off at the pass by metaphor, mystery; 'theology'. By the fact that we are emotion based reasoners. It's very easy to do. Look at Lewis, his false trichotomy is still used in Alpha.
The Fall therefore becomes intrinsic to existence, to creation. No Rick Warren demiurge required. I can easily do Love as the ground of infinite being. The Parousia becomes metaphoric amillenialism. Jesus returned by the Spirit. Infinite creation transcends on death. The New Heavens's and New Earths are always new to the newly resurrected, and constantly being renewed by being constantly populated, until the local source dies out. A hundred thousand years at the extreme most for us. Two hundred trillion (200,000,000,000,000) years for our infinitesimal universe. Our speck is infinitesimal within that. Of infinite within infinite. From forever. Never mind the vertigo of that fact, that absolute truth; faith, belief can find, make up a way, no matter how smart you are. Don't worry about it.
Well, if we go with Lewis in 'The Great Divorce' everything will be 'more real' than it is now.
We aren't 'told' much about the 'new heaven and the new earth' but we are told that things will be very different. 'They neither marry nor are given in marriage,' for instance which, put crudely suggests to me that certain items of anatomical tackle and plumbing will roomier be needed.
More positively perhaps, 'they will be like angels in heaven.'
Does that mean 'angelic' lions hippos, toads, mosquitoes angel fish, plankton, sparrows or hawks?
I'm not sure such speculation gets us very far. It's pretty clear that lions lying down with lambs is figurative.
I don't cross my fingers when I recite in the Creed, 'I believe... in the life of the world to come.'
But I can't give you a pocket-guide to it or an OS Map.
I thought I'd typed 'no longer be needed' not 'roomier'!
Perhaps there will be no predictive text after the Parousia ...
🤣🤣
Let's hope so!!
Or we will be freed from such notions of possessiveness and jealousy, and enhanced in our love for one another that the levels of intimacy currently only experienced as a couple will be available more widely, unmarred and undiluted, making marriage irrelevant.
Tied to that, I think our lives look very different when our entire structures of desire are changed and we aren't driven by the same imperatives for survival. This then maps to society as a whole. And this even before factoring in any radical transformations of abilities.
To get very speculative for a moment; I assume something similar will be in operation over Creation as a whole, but it's beyond our abilities to contemplate (in some ways some of the more 'supernatural' conceptions of eternity are easier to imagine).
Yeah, or alternatively the fall as a cosmic event operates over entire creation at once (both past and future), I think I've heard Hart mention something similar.
Well, perhaps my 'roomier' gaff wasn't a predictive text error but a Freudian slip ...
As an aside, I always thought that H G Wells's odd short story, 'In The Days Of The Comet' has a very convenient denouement insofar as (spoiler alert) free lurve is one of the legacies the near miss comet leaves as humanity awakens to a new, improved caring, sharing society.
Creation is infinite, from forever, so the Fall is intrinsic to it. And there is no past and no future.
The Andromeda galaxy will probably merge with ours. It won't actually have a great deal of effect. It would take place over millions of years. I think all you'd notice if you could do eon long comparisons is that the stars' real motion would be changing over that time period.
The sun turning into a red giant OTOH...
However this is what I'm trying to hammer out here. Does the Parousia mean an entirely new creation so these future events will never actually occur? Or is it merely local, in which case what happens to our new redeemed and recreated earth when the Sun does expand? Or something else?
It seems to me that the whole idea of the Creation, Fall and Parousia are rooted in a Greek cosmology - or even a Hebrew one - where this earth is central, created ex nihilo by God in a human timeframe with a relatively small universe around it, and of primary significance in that universe. Unfortunately that's not the universe we actually have, and that leads to questions like the ones I'm posing here.
I can't make that work without ballsing up causality and free will.
Have you ever seen the movie Time After Time? H.G. Wells chases Jack The Ripper into a time-machine, and they both end up in 1970s NYC, where Wells has to stop Jack from resuming his murderous career. Experiencing 1970s USA makes Wells call into question his previously utopian vision of the future.
I gather the time-line was devised to correspond to shifts in Wells' own real-life thinking, but I'm not familiar enough with his work to say for sure.
Obviously I don't know, and I don't think anyone here CAN know, but I suspect the Parousia means a new creation which MIGHT mean these future events don't happen--but might not. Because the new creation is probably (maybe?) linked to the old in much the same way that the resurrection body is linked to the mortal one--some things have changed, but not all--and since we're given only tantalizing glimpses of what that means for human bodies, it's pretty much impossible to work out what that could mean (if the analogy holds true) for the whole of creation. Wild guessing, no more...
On a slightly different note, it's a mistake to let the size of our cosmos over-awe us into thinking that God couldn't, wouldn't, choose a tiny planet like ours to do X or Y (where X or Y is some event of cosmic significance). Size is not the same thing as importance, and God has a track record of choosing the unimportant anyway--he seems to have a positive preference for it, to the point where the false idea of earth being central is almost an argument against God choosing it for anything.
But apart from that, I'd say "If X (incarnation, resurrection, kickoff of the Parousia, whatever) is going to happen at all, it has to happen somewhere" and wherever the chosen place is, there are bound to be people (creatures, whatever) saying that that location doesn't deserve the honor... Of course not. Because it doesn't go by deserving.
I can see why @KarlLB suggests the view I alluded to as ballsing up causality and freewill. Seeing as human freedom is a big issue in Orthodoxy I imagine the likes of Hart and Behr have given it some consideration but not having herd or read either of them on this issue I have no idea what that answer might be.
Wells's vision of the future in 'The Time Machine' was pretty bleak. It ends with a jellyfish-like blob, the future for us humans, expiring at the sea's edge under a weakening sun. Then ... oblivion.
Yeah, I think maybe the movie is supposed to take place just before he wrote The Time Machine, and therefore his view in that novel reflects his experience in a real time-traveling device.
As for free will that is a complete mystery anyway.
And nobody, as in nobody, gets, does infinity do they. The factiest fact that ever there was. In God or no, nothing changes; it's always more of the same, at every level. You all believe otherwise. Whereas I know.
I am not going to repeat an explanation for the nth time. Stop. It.
Doublethink, Admin
[/Admin]
It's not me you are arguing with, but yourself.
I'm always somewhat surprised that given your particular presuppositions that you hold so closely to free-will, because from a purely materialist view it's very hard to see from where it arises.
In terms of causality, I don't know, but if you recall the earlier thread about 'creation' comprising the entirety of space-time as a unified construct, then I suppose it could operate in the same way that any other intervention from 'beyond' operates (miracles, the Incarnation etc).
How so? I haven't changed my mind. I can't. I cannot do the utter absurdity of having to believe that every state change of every object is concurrently real in infinite now, because of the relativity of simultaneity (with no dots joined up), let alone some theological additional utter absurdity. Which has no impact on the fact of infinite reality from eternity. The 'illusion' of time, without beginning.
I must be wrong, as no one else who expresses themselves here has a problem with it.
I think that you have nailed it here.
In order to continue to believe in a literal Creation, Fall and Parousia, you have to dismiss all that we now know about the universe, its age and construction.
This has been clear for some time with regards to Creation and Fall but I am not aware that there has been that much awareness of how the Parousia is affected. By that, I mean that there are still many Christians who will happily accept the knowledge that we now have about the universe and so will also accept a non-literal Creation and Fall but who still hold to a literal (and even imminent) Parousia.
In that regard, one thing I’ve learned from The Bible Project podcasts, is that when people of the ANE talked about “creation,” they weren’t talking about the same thing we generally mean when we talk about “creation.” They weren’t talking about creation of something out of nothing; rather, they were talking about the creation of order from disorder/chaos. (Note that water isn’t created in the Genesis accounts; it’s simply there as a given, and uncontrolled it is chaotic.) In an ANE understanding, God’s act of creation was God bringing order where there was chaos (e.g., separating the land from the water, or the waters above the firmament from the waters under the firmament), not God making a cosmos ex nihilo.
So the issue of writings like the first chapters of Genesis being grounded in an ANE cosmological framework presents challenges both from the perspective of our not understanding their worldview as well as the perspective of us assuming our worldview applies.
This is one of the reasons I think texts like the first chapters of Genesis should be read as myth, not as, for lack of a better word, history. They are not there to tell us exactly how the world came into being, or who did what when. They are there to tell us, in symbolic and poetic rather than direct language, about the human condition and, I believe, God’s relationship with us and with creation, and our relationship with God. And I think that’s part of what so many bits of the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly the Psalms, are getting at when they talk about meditating on Scripture. These are stories that require sitting with, pondering and re-pondering, meditating on, to discern the truth they’re conveying.
At least that’s how I see it. I know others may and will see differently. I can live with that.
I don't see that it's necessary to dismiss it, after all the nature of the Parousia is that there is a rupture at some point and a new order generated from without.
FWIW, although you do get Orthodox fundies (particularly in the US I'm afraid) who take the Genesis creation stories literally, from what I can gather, the Orthoes generally believe that God did create the universe ex nihilo, but works in and through the natural processes we see around us in order to do so.
I can see the problems with an ex nihilo understanding of course.
More generally, and I am being very simplistic here, the Orthodox tend not to see the 'superatural' element as being some kind of divine zap ... which is how it's often framed within charismatic evangelical circles for instance - but rather God working in and through the processes or 'means' (to use a more Reformed term) we can see about us.
Shipmates may remember the Terry Gilliam animations for Monty Python's Flying Circus where a big foot descends from the clouds to squelch anyone who offends the Almighty. Well, that's the opposite of how we see it.
We are more panentheist.
That doesn't iron out all the creases or resolve all the difficulties of course, but it can steer us away from a brittle and a wooden literalism.
Not so much in conflict per se, but it does raise questions that aren't there with earlier understandings of the universe. As I asked earlier:
*Sun becoming a Red Giant, heat death of the universe...
Host hat on
It will need to be.
BroJames, Purgatory Host
Host hat off
Aye. It was in response to @Nick Tamen's post above declaring belief in their, even the OT's, inspiration. Their unnaturalness. As pseudepigraphical NT writers proclaimed.
Both the beginning and the ending are effectively outside of what we think of as time. I don't really think of either as being problematic in any sense. The middle, the incarnation, that's the anomaly. The ends are shrouded in myth and mystery and will be revealed in the fullness of time. The incarnation, though, that's where things are odd.
That all being said, what happens to the world we know after the return of Christ? Well who the fuck cares, strictly speaking. I mean you can just ask him when the time comes. More practically, it's outside the narrative. It's like asking how Sherlock Holmes would have used AI, idle speculation.