What It Means To Be Human

ADAM and EVE   by Ernst Fuchs

Our friend Sherry at A Feather Adrift has written another thought provoking essay on a range of religious issues. I’ve winnowed out several of her interesting questions for comment here. You will enjoy reading it  before you read this response.

Is God fully omniscient in time and space?
It is literally true that God is all and in all.  He inhabits the “circle of eternity.” God is possessed of unlimited power to know all things; he alone can be in two places, in numberless places. But even that is not all of God. The Infinite can be finally revealed only in infinity; the cause can never be fully comprehended by an analysis of effects; the living God is immeasurably greater than the sum total of creation that has come into being as a result of the creative acts of his unfettered free will.

As an infinite being, God comprehends the end from the beginning of “time,” because both time and space are “sub-absolute.” Space is not infinite, even though it takes origin from Paradise; we do not know the absolute limits of space, but we do know that the absolute of time is eternity.

It may be helpful to realize there are three different levels of time cognizance:
1. Mind-perceived time— consciousness of sequence, motion, and a sense of duration.
2. Spirit-perceived time— insight into motion Godward and the awareness of the motion of ascent to levels of increasing divinity.
3. Personality creates a unique time sense out of insight into Reality, plus a consciousness of presence and an awareness of duration.

Why doesn’t God reveal himself scientifically?
To Science, God is a possibility; to psychology a desirability, to philosophy a probability, to religion a certainty, an actuality of religious experience. Science seeks to identify, analyze, and classify the segmented parts of the limitless cosmos. Reason is the proof of science, faith (not mere belief) is the proof of religion, even as logic is the proof of philosophy. But science must end its reason-search in the hypothesis of a First Cause, because science can never validate God.

Only the personal experience of the faith sons of the Father can effect the actual spiritual realization of the personality of God. You cannot pray to a chemical formula, supplicate a mathematical equation, worship a hypothesis, confide in a postulate, commune with a process, serve an abstraction, or hold loving fellowship with a law. Reason then, would demand that a philosophy which cannot find the God of probability should be very respectful of the religious faith which can, and does, find the God of certitude.

And science should never discount religious experience on grounds of credulity, not so long as it persists in the assumption that our intellectual and philosophic endowments emerged from increasingly lesser intelligences the further back they go, to take origin in primitive life which was utterly devoid of any and all ability to think and feel.

Obviously there is a vast gulf between the infinity of God and the finiteness of man. As truth one may know God, but to understand enough to explain God, one must explore the fact of the universe of universes. The vast gulf between the experience of the truth of God, and ignorance as to the fact of God can be bridged only by living faith. Modern science has left true religion— the teachings of Jesus as translated in the lives of his believers— untouched. All science has done is to destroy the childlike illusions of many of the misinterpretations of life.

Can atheists be “just as moral as the next person”?
Static ethics and traditional morality are just slightly super-animal. Ethics and morals become truly human when they are dynamic and progressive. Morality is not necessarily spiritual; it may be wholly and purely human. But morality without religion fails to reveal ultimate goodness, and it also fails to provide for the survival of even its own moral values. Religion provides for the enhancement and assured survival of everything morality recognizes and approves.

Man can, intellectually, deny God, and yet be morally good, loyal, filial, honest, and even idealistic. And in so doing, man may graft many purely humanistic branches onto his basic spiritual nature, and apparently prove his atheistic contentions. But such an experience is devoid of survival values, God-knowingness, and God-ascension. In such an experience only social fruits are forthcoming, not spiritual.

If you truly believe in God— by faith know him and love him— don’t permit the reality of such an experience to be in any way lessened or detracted from by the doubting insinuations of science, the caviling of logic, the postulates of philosophy, or the clever suggestions of well-meaning souls who would create a religion without God. Live your faith, and it will grow to be of such towering strength it can never be shaken.

How do we define ourselves as “sentient” spiritual creatures?
Unspiritual animals know only the past and live in the present. Spirit-indwelt human beings have prevision— insight— we may visualize the future. “Sentience” must eventually come to be defined as self-conscious personality indwelt by Spirit. Animals are not “self-conscious,” thus they can never experience consciousness
of consciousness.

Self-consciousness implies the recognition of the reality of selves other than the conscious self, and further implies that such awareness is mutual; that the self is known as it knows.  But you cannot become so absolutely certain of a fellow being’s reality as you can of the reality of the presence of God that lives within you.

Were Adam and Eve real people?
Despite what current paleontology and DNA might suggest, Adam and Eve were real beings, but they were not evolutionary human beings born on this world.  As one might reasonably expect, the true story of their “creation,” as it has come down through 37,000 years of word of mouth, has been stripped of nearly all truth and recognition of the original events.

My first recommendation to anyone interested in the real story of Adam and Eve, or any cosmological question, is to read The Urantia Book.  There is simply no substitute for spiritual revelation.  Since that is a formidable commitment of both time and mental reflection, suffice it to say for our our purposes here that Adam and Eve were of a material order of divine sons who come to the evolving worlds of space;  these Material Sons and Daughters are the last physical link in the chain of personalities extending from divinity and perfection above, down to humanity and material existence below.  Their dispensations usually last many thousands of years, as they attempt to engraft the higher forms of creature life on the primitive men of the evolutionary worlds of space. Unfortunately, that did not fully happen on our world.

It’s hard not to think of the story of Adam and Eve in purely symbolic terms if all you’ve ever been exposed to is the Biblical account.  The story of creating Eve out of Adam‘s rib is a confused condensation of their arrival and the “celestial surgery” connected with the interchange of living substances associated with the coming of a corporeal staff of celestials, more than four hundred and fifty thousand years previously. It’s too long a story to unfold here, but it must be said that the so-called parents of the human race were at once the recipients of the most blessed, and the most tragic of circumstances of all of the several planetary “dispensations” of celestial over-care that have occurred here-to-for on our world.

The origins of the human race, as even our partial scientific understanding must attest, is a complex, multi-faceted mystery of staggering proportions;  as it quite naturally impinges on every realm of human experience.  That science has no business in spiritual matters is still a difficult hurdle for most critics of religion to understand, and only further complicates the examination of the interrelatedness of our planetary origins with our universe destiny as creatures.

That said, there are still many things about our origins that can be known, and known now, that will take science many, many more decades to factually unravel.  That this knowing must use living faith to achieve its certainty in no way lessens its relevance to individuals in pursuit of intelligent and worthy cosmological understanding.  It will probably remain a sad fact that many otherwise brilliant atheistic individuals will never discover the true nature of living faith, preferring instead the ludicrous but serviceable definition of faith as mere belief.

The fact that vast time is involved in the attainment of God makes the presence and personality of the Infinite none the less real. Our individual ascension is a part of the circuit of the vast universe, and though we may swing around it countless times, we may expect, in spirit and in status, to be ever swinging inward. We can depend upon being translated from sphere to sphere, from the far outer circuits where we are now, to ever nearer the inner center, and our destination, Paradise.  And some day, doubt not, we shall stand in the divine and central presence and see him, figuratively speaking, face to face.