How the heck could God create humans in her own image?

Today I was planning to write about another subject, but after responding to a commenter who embraces the idea that humans are made in the image of God (who I prefer to view as a nonexistent female, hence this blog post title), I went with that notion.

I'm not sure why Andrew Stephens shared the links in his comment. I'm assuming he uses Musk and Harari as examples of godless secularists, which probably is accurate. Personally, I admire both of these men, being a happy user of Musk's groundbreaking Starlink satellite internet system and having enjoyed each of Harari's brilliantly written books.

Brian, you will be pleased to know that Elon Musk wants to start human trials with Neuralink this year. https://www.wired.com/video/watch/wired-news-and-science-the-science-behind-elon-musks-neuralink-brain-chip

Also, Yuval Noah Harari describes humans as 'hackable animals' and 'useless eaters'. https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/hope-people-believe-in-scientists-instead-of-religious-leaders-yuval-noah-harari-on-covid-19-pandemic-1666859-2020-04-14

Some of us prefer to believe that humans are made in the image of God.

This was my reply.

Andrew, there's also some of us who prefer to believe that humans are made in the image of humans, and that dogs are made in the image of dogs, and that giraffes... you get the idea.

Do you actually think that God, the supposed creator of this vast universe, looks like a human? I realize that this is how God typically is depicted, an old white guy rocking a cool long beard, but this notion seems really dubious.

So what is it about humans that makes you believe we are the image of God? When I see the news each day, this strikes us as exceedingly unlikely. To offer a couple of examples, what is it about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump you find godlike?

If God is good with invading Ukraine and trying to overturn an election, I'm pleased to be an atheist.

I should also mention that it's as certain as anything in science that humans evolved into our present Homo sapiens species over millions of years. Billions, actually, if we go back to the first cellular life on Earth. Given your theory, at what point did humans become made in the image of God?

Was it only when Homo sapiens appeared on the planet? If so, what changed in the nature of Homo sapiens that wasn't godlike before our species evolved into its current form? Or do you believe other species in our evolutionary family tree, like the Neanderthals, also were made in the image of God?

I'm curious, because this whole "made in the image of God" thing has never made sense to me. It just seems way too anthropomorphic, aside from the fact there's no demonstrable evidence for God. If God exists, a big "if," I don't see how humans would be made in the image of God but not, say, alien beings in a galaxy far, far away.

Or do you consider that all conscious beings are made in the image of God? If so, I'll tell our dog the good news.

Proving how clueless I am about Christian theology, I had to Google "how are humans made in the image of God" before composing this post to learn that the image of God idea comes from Genesis in the Old Testament, so it is a tenet of Christianity and Judaism.

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them (Genesis 1:26-27).

Not surprisingly, there's no agreement about what it means for God to have created humans in her own image. As I said in my reply to Andrew, the Genesis passage predates our modern understanding of evolution, so the idea that God created Adam and Eve is, of course, ridiculous.

However, one website I came across asks, How could humans have evolved and still be in the "Image of God"? I was curious to know the answer, but it wasn't very persuasive.

How might these models of the image of God fit with evolution? At BioLogos we believe that God created humans in biological continuity with all life on earth; the distinct cognitive abilities we have were given to us by God through this gradual process. We also believe that God created us as spiritual beings; God established a unique relationship with humanity by endowing us with his image and calling us to an elevated position within the created order. Science cannot judge our spiritual capacities or divine calling, so there is no contradiction. These various views are affirmed by individuals in the BioLogos community, and in fact the views are not mutually exclusive.

Good try, though this approach goes against the plain language in Genesis that God created humans, not  that God set up a gradual billions-of-years-long process for Darwinian natural selection to come up with us Homo sapiens. 

I took a glance at some other Google search results, but my head started to hurt from reading Christian gobbledygook, so I didn't get very far with this. If you have a greater tolerance for that than I do, some links are here, here, here, here, here, and here. 

Comments

[arun marwah]

You should read Bhagvad Gita to know all the answers.

[Appreciative Reader]

"Some of us prefer to believe that humans are made in the image of God."

..........We know. We find it amazing that there should still be such people, educated people, in this day and age; but we do know that there still are those who, like you, buy into that absurd fairy tale concocted by a bunch of ignorant superstitious goatherds from two millennia ago and more.

I'm curious: Are you a Creationist, or ID-ist, or whatever? Or do you believe in evolution, except you append it with a blithely unthinking "But God did it"?

If you'd like to discuss your God-made-man-in-his-image belief vis-a-vis your thoughts on evolution, that might make for interesting reading.

[Appreciative Reader]

"You should read Bhagvad Gita to know all the answers."

(Posted by: arun marwah | July 02, 2022 at 10:03 PM)

..........Answers to what? What are the questions?

[777]

It s not the image
It s HER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4aHWG7aqPM

777

[Appreciative Reader]

"Science cannot judge our spiritual capacities or divine calling, so there is no contradiction."

..........Indeed. This is how Creation happened: Brahma awoke into consciousness, amidst a vast undending infinte sea. He imagined himself the creator, but lo! He was seated on a lotus, and the lotus sprang from the navel of Vishnu, who reclined in rest on Shesh Nag the serpent, who created for Vishnu a huge pedestal floating on a vast ocean.

Science cannot judge any of these deeper truths. Therefore, there is no contradiction.

And the Bible cannot possibly judge the creation myths of the Hindus. Therefore there is no contradiction.

Likewise, the Bhagvat Puran cannot possibly judge the Judeo-Christian creation myth. Therefore there is no contradiction there either.

In fact, we hereby decree that there is no contradiction anywhere. We hereby proscribe for good the blasphemous word, "contradiction". Therefore, clearly, there is no contradiction.

Likewise, we hereby proscribe that uppity sacrilegous words, "rationality" and "science", both born of hubris, and both effectively synonymous with the Tree of Knowledge, and therefore instrumental in Man's fall, the cause of his original sin. Therefore, in as much as henceforth there is no longer any rationality and no longer any science, there is now no more anything that is irrational and no longer anything that is unscientific.

Therefore, God did make man in his image. That is not irrational. That is not unscientific. Nor is it nonsensical. (Because we've hereby also abolished the word "nonsense".) Nor is it irrational, or unscientific, or nonsensical, that the world was created when a lotus sprouted from the navel of Vishnu as he lay resting on an ocean, and from the lotus emerged Brahma, who created the world.

There. Religion proven once and for all as not contradicting science, confounding once and for all the machinations of the silly and hubristic and evil designs of rationalists and atheists and other assorted promoters of scientism.

Halleluhah! Hari Om!

[Generation77]

Appreciative Reader, tell us how the universe and life came into existence. What started the universe, and what started life.

[Ron E.]

Questions about God and how everything came into being are totally unique to mankind. Okay to delve and discover from the point of view of science, to learn and put such knowledge to practical use, but apart from that, apart from natural inquisitiveness, if one cares to look at how the God issue has become an issue for us, then look no further than our own mind.

Akin with the four previous blogs it must be blatantly obvious that what drives the issues of God’s, souls, life after death – and all the many, many beliefs and desires for some sort of permanence and continuation, is the lack of understanding of the ‘self’, the ‘me’, ‘I’ or ‘ego’ concept.

The brain/body organism has evolved to survive, with the ultimate aim to get its genes into the next generation. Similarly. the ‘self’s’ main drive is also to survive, but paradoxically, because the self is a mental construct (in effect an illusion), it cannot survive – except through the mental constructs the mind (another construct) invents.

Such concepts, usually in the form of various beliefs of souls (another word for self) or essences etc., are used to allay the fear of death, of annihilation.

The good news is, once the ‘self’ is seen for the transient construct that it is, a good deal of the desperate need to maintain it via beliefs etc., drops away. Of course, the body organism will still struggle to survive, but the neurotic desire of the ‘self’ to continue in some form dissipates. In fact, as the body ages and deteriorates, death may seem not so bad.

[Appreciative Reader]

"Appreciative Reader, tell us how the universe and life came into existence. What started the universe, and what started life."

Posted by: Generation77 | July 03, 2022 at 07:27 AM

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Hi, Generation77.

Was that a sincere question, or were you angling for a Gotcha there? Either way, here's my answer:

Note that this is an emphatically-not-an-expert's rough-and-ready answer, no doubt full of inaccuracies, but, very broadly, I believe is a true enough picture of what science tells us. (I could have looked up a bunch of stuff online in ten or fifteen minutes to try to give you a more complete picture, but what the heck. If your question was asked sincerely, and if my answer picques you enough to want to arrive at a more accurate and complete picture, well then you can Google as well as I. And maybe if you do you could return the favor by presenting us with a more complete picture. But anyway, a rough and ready will do for now.)

As far as we can tell, the universe has been steadily expanding over the last ~14B years. We can extrapolate back in time, using the SR and GR equations (actually SR equations suffice by themselves, I believe, but I'm fuzzy about that; so let's just say SR and/or GR equations), to a point around 10 ^ (~40) seconds after a hypothetical singularity. At that time the universe was teeny tiny thing, so small that SR/GR equations, and indeed regular physics as we know it, no longer applies. QM equations would, I guess; but that's a whole mess, and does not really allow of much deterministic fiddling around beyond a point. So that, the straightforward answer is before that point, before 10 ^ (~-40 seconds) after the hypothetical singularity, we don't actually know what the fuck happened, and as of yet we've not yet devised any means of finding out. But we're tyring to, our best brains are working their asses off to try to find out, in part by devising a Grand Unified Theory, the holy grail of physics.

Although we don't know what happened before that point, but we've got a whole lot of guesses and conjectures. But no point in diving into that, mainly because I'm no expert and will probably end up presenting an embarrassingly inaccurate picture. At least I would if I didn't spend some time cross-checking stuff online, and I'm too lazy to do that, and because this much should suffice actually, extremely hazy thought "this much" is as far as details.

Now your turn, G77. I'm waithing for (a) you "Thank you"; or (b) your "You're broadly correct, but entirely embarrassingly wrong as far as the details, and the details are this and this and this and this", or (c) your "Dum da dum dum dum, so Gotcha! God did it!"

[Generation77]

@AR:

"Although we don't know what happened before that point."

As I expected, you (and the world have science) have no actual answer re how the universe came to be, or about how life came to be.

If you sense snark in my question, was there snark in your initial post on this topic?

[Brian Hines]

Generation 77, since you're anti-science, share with us how you think the universe came into being. Maybe you'll get a Nobel prize if you're right, but I'm 99.999999999% certain that you're just one of those religious believers who likes to criticize science because science knows so much more than religion and you're envious that religions make zero progress in the realm of knowledge while science makes continuous progress.

[Generation77]

"the neurotic desire of the ‘self’ to continue in some form dissipates. In fact, as the body ages and deteriorates, death may seem not so bad."

And yet the non-selfers (those who say they've realized they have no "self') cling to life and to all the appurtenances of material existence just as tenaciously as the rest of us.

By the way, "neurotic" means you're afflicted by neurosis, a word that has been in use since the 1700s to describe mental, emotional, or physical reactions that are drastic and irrational. Can a good case be made that belief in a self or soul leads to baleful results? If there is, I haven't seen it presented here.

I understand the Buddhist argument for anatta and why it appeals to some people. But I don't think people realize how incomplete an argument it is.

[um]

A couple of days we were shown a docu titled "Descending the mountain"
For those that do not know it is an experiment about the effect off LSD on Zen meditators. in Lucern, Switzerland and researcher are closely related to those that discovered LSD somewhere after 1970 and its possible use for treating patients.

In the move the made an remark about the differences between science, art and meditation... being ...describing, expressing and experiencing reality

Although each approach can be helpful for the other [ reason to conduct the scientific experiment] these approaches will for ever be separated in function and use.

[Appreciative Reader]

"As I expected, you (and the world have science) have no actual answer re how the universe came to be,"

..........What? I just told you, very roughly and approximately, what we do know. Science has uncovered a great many things; and a great many things have so far still not been found out, but it's a work in process, and in any case science is perfectly honest about what it doesn't know.

What other kind of answer do you want? What other kind of answer is even possible?

I mean, surely you see the contrast between the above, and the answers that religion provides, which is basically making up random stuff out of whole cloth?!

----------

" or about how life came to be."

..........That's a question you never even asked me. And that I did not even address.

----------

"If you sense snark in my question, was there snark in your initial post on this topic?:"

..........I asked you if you were angling for a Gotcha. I set forward both possibilities, that you might be sincere, as well as that you might be going for the gotcha thing. So far it looks like the latter.

Was I going for snark in the post immediately preceding, the one about the navel lotus thing? Of course I was. What else do you do, but fucking laugh out loud, when some inveterately superstitious religious dupe tells you that God created man in his image in six days' time, or some other religious person tells you that god had a flower growing out of his tummy and another god was born from that flower and that second god then created the whole world. The only thing more hilarous than those infantile stories, is the idea that someone might be stupid enough to actually believe them.

[Appreciative Reader]

Oh, I beg your pardon, you did ask me what started life. I hadn't noticed.

I guess the answer is the same as the Big Bang thing. We do know about how life evolved, in a great deal of detail. But so far we don't actually know, not exactly, how life was actually fomed, how inanimate transfomred into animate. That's the honest answer. We do have guesses, but not evidenced guess, not about the initial spark, not so far, not exactly.

Again, that's honest. Again, that's gradually getting to know more, a WIP. Again, that's infinitely better than the answers relgion gives us, which is random made-up nonsense.

[777]

So; . . . U describe all non_possibilities
The nobel answer is
thay in real reality : nothing happens

S/HE just IS
and is fooling ( also around ) those who try to physically describe

What would all of U do with eternal 10 ^ (~40) >10 ^ (~-40)
S/HE has10 ^ (~40000 000 000 000 000) ways to make Love

777

[Ron E.]

The question is, “Why do we believe?”, not the type of belief that develops from a hypothesis to a theory but the beliefs that look for some divine guidance or answer. Such beliefs are not the truth but are often accepted as such.

Generally, the need to believe is endemic to us humans – and somewhat natural. One study found that: “Human beings have natural tendencies to believe in God and life after death – according to a three-year international research project directed by two academics at the University of Oxford.” Some of the reasons for these types of belief include: - “Not feeling alone; Peer and family pressure; Fear of death; Fear of freedom and responsibility along with the universal belief that supernatural agency inhabits the world and can influence event.”

Apparently, it seems that we are programmed to believe – which is probably why conspiracy theories abound. And we also have an ego need to believe. The ego, the mind’s self structure, has a huge agenda to survive. It has a desperate need to be right and also a need to believe it will (somehow) survive the death of the body.

To be free of the need to believe one must surely need to understand the mental processes that create them. To this end the mind needs to be observed in action along with its subsidiary aspects of self, thought and memory. In avoiding this enquiry into self study in favour of accepting some authority’s belief system, is to stay in the cycles of confusion and anxiety and generally divorced from the reality of life.

[Roger]

Realizing what makes sense evidentially and what works experientially is the middle way solution to belief and doubt.

One can suggest that the most helpful approach to life is to challenge all beliefs and all doubts equally.

If you simply believe something is true without questioning it to see if there is any credible evidence (not anecdotal) to support it, your mind will close around the belief and you will need to defend it which causes the mind to worry.

If you doubt everything without questioning it to see if there is any credible evidence to support or refute it, the mind will remain in a state of confusion and worry.

Belief and doubt provide the opportunity for intellectual laziness and prevents the opportunity for the development of critical thinking skills.

[Generation77]

Belief in no-self is still belief in God. That's precisely the problem with the arguments from atheists who ridicule the idea of God, yet have a practicing belief in Taoism, Advaita or any school of Buddhism.

These no-selfer atheists still believe the universe has provided a system where eradication of self-concepts leads to a state of ultimate satisfaction and wholeness.

Their belief begs the question of where this universe came from, where life came from, and where consciousness came from. And why this universe rewards those who are (to put it succinctly if clumsily) egoless.

Those who are attracted to Sant mat have a belief in the divine origins and structure of the universe to reward egolessness. That is, they believe the universe has provided the means to achieve egolessness through the Shabd and the guru. Sant mat teachings say the ultimate origin of this universe and its escape hatch of liberation have been provided by "God."

If one becomes disaffected by Sant mat and pursues a Taoist, Advaitic or Buddhist concept of arriving at the state of no-self, what has really changed? Not much really. Whether one is a devoted RSSBer or a Zen Buddhist, there's still that abiding faith that the universe is so constructed that it rewards the egoless with liberation.

To truly not believe in any kind of God is to have an unconditional acceptance of nihilism. Someone who truly doesn't believe in God would utterly reject Taoism, Advaita and Buddhism.

By the same token, those who pursue Eastern thought or even scientific thought to achieve a state of no-self are still believers in God, just as much as the Sant Matter, just as much as the Christian.

[Brian Hines]

Generation 77, thanks much for supporting our non-religious cause here at the Church of the Churchless. I do my best to ridicule religious belief, but it really takes a religious believer like yourself to point out the absurdity of religiosity, because I'm not able to visualize all the craziness that lurks in a believer's cranium.

To summarize your bizarre comment...

Those who don't believe in God, or a self/soul, and feel better because of their lack of belief actually believe in God since the universe rewards their non-belief with a sense of satisfaction. MARVELOUS! This is so crazy I've never seen even fervent fundamentalists make that sort of argument. Congratulations, you've broken new ground in the annals of blind belief.

And you further argue the obvious: that those who DO believe in God also believe in God. Therefore everybody on earth believes in God!

By your horribly twisted logic, those who don't like watching football on TV actually enjoy football, because not watching football makes them feel better. And those of us who can't stand Donald Trump and rejoiced when he lost the 2020 presidential election actually like Trump, because we felt better when he was no longer president.

Again, thanks for demonstrating that God doesn't exist. Because if She did, religious believers like you wouldn't feel the need to engage in such weird reasoning in a fruitless attempt to prove God is real. If God truly existed, all you'd have to do is point to the evidence, which you can't do.

[um]

@ Brian

Years ago I came it across as an social-psychological argumentation.

I do remember it as my reaction at the time as that one of unbelief as it excludes any possibility of "not being involved" and making all and everybody "guilty" participants on what is going on in the world

Strange to be confronted with that reasoning again after so many years.

[d]

@Generation77 [ Their belief begs the question of where this universe came from, where life came from, and where consciousness came from. And why this universe rewards those who are (to put it succinctly if clumsily) egoless.]

Indeed. IMO, that's the more interesting intersection of mystic believer
and no-self atheist. And not whether one professes a belief in a deity,
however temporarily, as a testable notion.

The no-self atheist,who rises out of the coffin and declares "no evidence
of a deity", becomes an anti-theist and sucks the blood out of test labs.
He appears to be discouraged with his own search and says "See, I
searched all night. God wasn't found in any of my lab samples. Ergo,
He's a myth." The mystic counters "It's a long, tough slog. Maybe one
in a million will succeed quickly. Don't give up. You'll see more and
more success as the 'self' falls away. One day you'll arise from the
coffin and set it ablaze.

[Dungeness]

"Posted by: d | " Oops.