DWill wrote:Christianity, I think, asks to be an exception from the workings of normal history, so that this God who was conceived before 1000 BCE undergoes no changes as he is worshiped and written about during the next millenium. It's all the same, unchanging God. I realize it has to be this way for Christians, or the idea of a God who changes would have to be introduced, which would mean that he is less than all-knowing and perfect. If you see God as a human creation, of course he does change over time.
I can anticipate the response to this. God
is unchanging. However, throughout history our conception of this God has evolved to a position closer to what God actually is. I just solved your conundrum, DWill. This would account for the many different religions of the world, all sort of groping towards the real God who remains mostly mysterious and unknowable except for those who have a "relationship" with him.
We've discussed the following passage from Robert Wright's book,
The Evolution of God. Wright suggests that throughout history the conception of God has moved closer and closer to
plausibility. Obviously we must renegotiate our conception of God because times do change. The OT God is very much out of sync with the times and so must evolve.
Wright wrote:There have been many such unsettling (from religion’s point of view) discoveries since then, but always some notion of the divine has survived the encounter with science. The notion has had to change, but that’s no indictment of religion. After all, science has changed relentlessly, revising if not discarding old theories, and none of us think of that as an indictment of science. On the contrary, we think this ongoing adaptation is carrying science closer to the truth. Maybe the same thing is happening to religion. Maybe, in the end, a mercilessly scientific account of our predicament—such as the account that got me denounced from the pulpit of my mother’s church—is actually compatible with a truly religious worldview, and is part of the process that refines a religious worldview, moving it closer to truth.
Until believers get at the truth, it seems to me they must increasingly focus on the more speculative areas of science—the Big Bang, quantum physics, etc. This God must necessarily reside in the
gap between scientific knowledge and the unknown. Dexter, who hasn't been around for a while (unfortunately), once asked the question about the human soul with regard to the evolution of humans. Knowing now that our categorization of species is very arbitrary and that the evolution of all species occurs so slowly and gradually that there never really was a "first human." So Dexter asked, at what point did God put a soul into humans? The fact is, our knowledge of biology has overgrown primitive conceptions of reality. Adam and Eve is a fable that simply doesn't mesh with modern science. Evolution itself poses some real problems for some people and, so, it becomes necessary to make a choice between fable and fact. Some people choose the fable at which point the rationalizations begin.