Paul Anleitner - Evolution, Creation, and the Cosmic Nature of Christ 

This was a great conversation! I really like how you two were able to weave together evolution, with the platonic ideal, and a divine telos as what humanity is moving towards. Possibly even as part of what is meant by the physical resurrection.

Fun conversation ! Always interesting to hear the process people go through as they mature out of a “fundamentalist” biblical framework. My family never went to church so when I discovered God and religion at age 20 or so I didn’t have that baggage. On the other hand, I missed out on learning scripture like you guys. I discovered God and Teilhard de Chardin about the same time and have been an Evolutionary ever since. The really exciting thing to me is realizing that I am cooperating with evolution’s purpose and goals by recognizing and promoting this understanding. I feel like you two are seeing and feeling this too. God is using evolution to create a spiritual universe. As Paul said, the lessons we learn from this “free will “ experience will serve us forever as we become more and more Divine on our journey through our eternal future with Christ and our vast family of spiritual siblings.

With this topic you didn't invite me or Jordan Daniel Wood? In all seriousness I am sure it's excellent and look forward to watching it later.

My experience was somewhat similar to yours; my middle school put a lot of emphasis on Ken Ham-style creationism. I always enjoyed taking about it as a geology nerd/fossil collector, but I had misgivings about it for the same reason. I had pretty much abandoned creationism by high school. The section where you and Anlietner talk about Christ as the “hermeneutic key” to the rest of scripture converges with something I’ve been thinking about a lot. Without ties to a strong metaphysics, symbols/allegories are arbitrary constructs. I think that large parts of scripture can be accepted as allegorical IF AND ONLY IF the life, death and resurrection of Christ are held to be historical, as the ontology they entail lends priority to non-literal Christian symbols. If the key points of the gospel were reinterpreted as pure allegory (*cough*liberal Protestants*cough*), the entire Christian narrative would become arbitrary; possibly useful but no more authoritative as a metaphor that Harry Potter or Star Wars.

This is a wonderful conversation, literally Let plausibility be our guide. The universe is intelligible, and that's profound, and it's as accomodating as we endeavor and succeed in attuning ourselves to it by developing niches and communities of niches grounded in mutual respect.

Damn! Sweet Sweet Dialogos!!! Thank you gentlemen!!! 🙏❤️🙏

Great convo...Sam's take on Evil as pattern for the short term at the expense of the long term pattern...that struck me

1:36:00 heavenly bodies as divine: In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas." Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of. C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Chronicles of Narnia, #3) Also, the whole Ransom trilogy.

These was such a fantastic conversation. The part about the Bible almost being like God-sanctioned mythology was something I’d never considered and is such a liberating thought.

Thank you both! Going to have to listen to this a few times.

Super inspiring Sam! GOD always asks us to be patient both during Good and bad times and why would HE the ultimate Creator not be the Most Patient Creator!? GOD does not work in mysterious ways but HE works in slow and patient ways.

Great conversation

This is such a great convo

This was great. I think there are some additional complexities regarding the societal outcomes. In particular, breeding for neoteny clearly creates a possibly catastrophic defection scenario because the ratio of smaller chimps required to displace the tyrannical alpha approaches infinity. I think this can be understood as the reason for aristocracy. Essentially aristocrats act as a kind of insurance against outside forces like the vikings but the cost becomes taxation. Like you said this can degenerate into a kind of parasitic relationship or in the case of raiders there is an incentive to take as much as possible because the game is not iterated. Lots of interesting threads to pull on

This is a fantastic convo. The problem with Peterson's approach (and McClellan, the historical critical scholar lol) is that they do not treat the text as "scripture". In other words, they engage it in a way that is not mediated by history of the Church in which the bible takes on a different form as a collective narrative pointing to Christ. The read "The Bible" and perhaps say some interesting things about the stories. But nonetheless the treat those stories as isolated narratives. Such a reading is cold and does not draw out the depth of scripture, which is not found in discreet "facts" about history or psychological states of the authours. The depth of Biblical stories emerges when it is placed in conversation with the Church that calls it scripture. This is still a journey for myself but now I am seeing the limitations of cold historical critical objective approaches to scripture. Paul is so right. The correct objection to such scholarship is not that it lacks faith, or is too critical, or denies historicity. The correct objection is that such an approach does not treat the Bible as narrative ensconced in the life and history of the Church that calls it scripture and creatively and intentionally retells and interprets the stories in ways that only God can inspire. This is what the apostles clearly do.

I am convinced that the Stephen Meyer critique of evolution which is that there's not direct physical observable evidence of evolution through genetic mutation the way there is for say gravitational theory is basically correct. The reason creationism persists is because people who want to argue with Ken Hamm get caught on this point but sort of miss the bigger picture that evolution doesn't need to be teleological for it to be worthwhile. The focus of any scientific theory should be the formulation of hypothesis and I think a lot of creationist were right that many of the theories of evolution in the 20th and 21st century went well beyond that humble mission. The idea of 'expertise' in the academy is probably what killed the creationist vs evolutionist debates more than anything because modern scientists aren't particularly interested in a grand theory of everything the way naturalists were circa 1900.

Damn this is a great conversation

As far as the creationism vs evolution issue I think you guys made an important point about the story being laid over the data of how life changed over time to where we are today. As part of that the evolutionary story typically presented to us is natural selection with random mutation. I think very few people take issue with natural selection, but random mutation is extremely unlikely as the mechanism IMO. I think that part has issues both theologically and mathematically/scientifically. There must be some heuristic at work that is better at aiming towards that ideal, and I think convergent evolution is evidence of that.

“The body perisheble is raised imperishable.” Resurrection in flesh or resurrection in spirit is a big question for me.

26:00 carrying on Jungs work: 'What I have tried to do, is to show the Christian what the Redeemer really is, and what the resurrection is. Nobody today seems to know, or to remember, but the idea still exists in dreams' ~ C.G.Jung

28:56 Wonder if he's referring to Pete Enns... I've found some of his stuff to be helpful but too much deconstructing and not enough reconstructing lol.

Loved this, and love Paul's stuff. Would love to do a podcast if you're interested.

1:12:20 I feel like “super chickens”is the blind spot in Malcom & Simone Collin’s plan.

Beating the Vikings and evolution of dominant culture telotically: King Arthur.

No sound?

I watched a video once about how coal formations developed because trees started growing but it took a few million more years for the microorganisms that could decompose tree matter to evolve, and I just couldn’t muster the faith to believe it. Also taught 6-8th grade science and noticed we had to stop doing experiments and the book switched from photos to cartoons when we got to the section on evolution; it’s taught to kids in the form of mythology. But the real interesting thing was the way the scientific community blackballed Velikovsky even though he made several astronomical predictions that were later verified. The consensus loyalty to uniformitarianism reeks of the same dogmatism with which the Catholic Church clung to its Aristotelian/ptolemaic tradition in the days of Copernicus and Galileo.

1:02:39 the brothers of Dinah taking revenge on the sons of Shechem.

Objective historical critical scholar = Dan McClellan haha definitely him

1:25:34 is there not therefore a call to surrender our deliberative will? Use the will destroy the will? Conquer will by will? Not mine but thine be done?

1:14:15 League of Villians in My Hero Academia ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UMZHx0mL5hM.html It was founded by 'All for One' in contrast to the avatar state of the heroes encapsulated by 'One for All'

1:39:55 re: The coach shaping of the church community from the emanation (top down authority) and the emerging bottom up conformity of the lay people I would argue that this is not possible in a confessionalist Church.

P.S. I am 75 now !

Evolution is not limited to man of course. If God is the ground of evolution then we have to explain and justify the problem of evil and animal suffering. For example, how does the evolution of the "zombie-ant fungus" accomplish the telos described in 1 Cor 15?

Why not the falling of souls? What if "being" preceded God? What if God evolved?

1:37:50 seeds: “receive with meekness the implanted Word, which is able to save your souls”

I find no contradiction with literal young earth creation. To say that there is a person who is capable of creating, from nothing, time and material _at all_ includes an implicit power over all of the elements that we now use to build contradictory explanations. The complaint as I understand it has been not that God couldn't do it but that somehow it would be disingenuous for Him to give some appearance of age or process. I don't find those arguments necessary or persuasive.

1:24:53 St. Maximus the Confessor jiving with evolution. Deliberative (gnomic) and natural (holy Instinctualized) wills. Christ only had the natural/holy will. He wasn’t deliberating.

My bad. Sorry.

An old earth and guided evolution together imply that death was a product of God's original creation and goodness. As per scripture, if death is the enemy, then is that to say the enemy proceeded from God's essence kind of like the demiurge? Wouldn't that be a contradiction if God is good, God is love, and God is the God of the living? If this is so, then was God's son, and as a consequence, billions of humans (many of whom will be assigned to hell) doomed to die from eternity past? I hope not, because that's not a god I want to worship... I have to say this pretentious highbrow attitude Christian evolutionists have (and yes, even you guys project it) toward Young Earth Creationists as being anti-science is, to me, akin to New Athiesm's elitist pseudo-intellectualism. There are a ton of scientists and PHDs that accept the biblical accounts of a young earth, and that number is growing rapidly. To be honest, Sam I was kind of shocked when you said that it wasn't the data but rather your "heart" that convinced you of evolution. I appreciate your honesty, and if my presumption here is wrong, please correct me, but wouldn't you say approval-seeking from your direct peers or the majority in general is what leads many Trinitarians today to stay Trinitarian? Just as evidence can go both ways in the Trinitarianism vs. Unitarianism debate, my question to you is: Putting aside the evidence, why does your heart reject progressive revelation in regard to your christology but not your cosmology?