by Gill 12 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
September's Awake mag, discusses evolution.
On page 20 it makes the claim that' (the Bible), does not support the idea that life arose from nonliving matter or that God started off the process of evolution with a single cell.'
However, if I remember the account of creation in Genesis, God created Adam from the 'dust of the ground'. Am I mistaken here, or could the WTBTS be confused? I 'the dust of the ground' alive or is it not?
Dust is non-living.
Were they implying that living organisms always existed?
bebu
Having your cake and eating it too.
Depends what the original word for "dust" was that was written in the Aramaic text. "Dust" may just be a poor English translation of a word with
a different meaning, but I have no idea of the original linguistics of this scripture.
Incidentally, "dust" as we know it, is teeming with living microorganisms, bacteria, cellular debris, etc.
(the Bible), does not support the idea that life arose from nonliving matter
Don't these guys even do the most rudimentary editing to check for consistency?
"formed from the dust of the ground" = "non-living matter"!
If life only arises from previously existing life, that implies a sort of pantheism, i.e., life ultimately had to have been formed from part of God, or the substance of God, or whatever you want to call it.
See what happens when you join Bethel at age 18 and eventually end up on the writing committee? You still have the reasoning ability of a child, and your statements are written at that level.
nonliving matter
Can it be proven that matter is totally devoid of life? As sir82 correctly surmised, this fallls into the pantheist field.
Depends what the original word for "dust" was that was written in the Aramaic text.
Maybe it meant "funk".
according to the bible:
And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
and
Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
sounds pretty much like evolution
I view matter, any matter, as alive in one sense or another, even if only on an atomic or sub-atomic level. If there is activity on any level, and if it can interact with other matter, then I view it as alive. So, I have no difficulty in considering biological life arising from electro-chemical interactions. Biological life is simply a more complex form of electro-chemistry.
Yeah, I guess there can be a fuzzy line between life and non-life. Thinking back to high school biology I seem to remember that viruses were not considered living things, but that position was somewhat debatable.
Now that you've sparked my interest in this, I've found a pretty interesting Wikipedia article on the subject:
