Literally in the Image of God

[_honorentheos]

In another thread, MG made the following statement -

Most if not all of the views of God out there just didn't/don't make sense to me. The only one(s) that do are the ones that teach that we are literally created in the image/form of God.

I admit, this was a bit of a shocking statement to me as it is almost the polar opposite of my view. While I lean atheistic, I don't tend to view myself as a hard atheist so much as the notions of God which I've encountered to date seem highly improbable given the evidence, and that seems to be a trend I can count on.

But of all the improbable ideas out there, the notion that we homo sapien sapiens are prototyped off of a divine, physically present in space-time homo sapien celestii to whom we bear pre-mortal kinship and like whom we may transform into is at the top of the list of improbables. It implies conclusions that are contradicted by just about every branch of modern science from biology to physics. It appropriates the histories of ancient peoples and their mythologies beyond what our investigation of history supports, and has to my mind nothing inherent within the concept to really recommend it.

So I'm genuinely curious what makes this the one concept that makes sense to anyone given even the slightest bit of reflection on what it means for everything we know about the natural universe around us.

[_Maksutov]

Looks like untenable anthropocentrism to me.

[_honorentheos]

Looks like untenable anthropocentrism to me.

That seems like the only real explanation for MG's statement to me as well.

[_Maksutov]

Looks like untenable anthropocentrism to me.

That seems like the only real explanation for MG's statement to me as well.

It's interesting because religionists sometimes criticize humanists for making humans the measure of all things...yet isn't that what this argument amounts to?

[Guest]

Maybe MG has taken to reading Nietzsche lately?

lololololol just kidding #hedoesntread

- Doc

[_Lemmie]

I hope Analytics doesn't mind if I copy his post over to this thread. He made some excellent points about the OP topic:

Most if not all of the views of God out there just didn't/don't make sense to me. The only one(s) that do are the ones that teach that we are literally created in the image/form of God.

And there aren't so many of those, if I'm not mistaken.

If for some reason I was convinced that this view didn't make sense, I would become an atheist. I know...we create God in our image...but that's not really true. Many folks create God in the image of something other than themselves.

Mormonism does a pretty good job of sticking with and hanging out with a God in whose image/form we are created.

Regards,
MG

Conceptually, the God of Mormonism is a coherently defined entity. Sure. The problem is that by defining God the way they do, we can say with an extremely high degree of confidence that the God of Mormonism doesn't really exist. He couldn't. There is a staggering amount of evidence that we are not the children of a glorified Sapiens from another planet who created us in his image. Rather, we are the children of apes from earth. Not only are we the children of apes, we are apes. Humans are simply another species of animal that like all life on this planet, evolved from something else from this planet. Science has detailed answers to the questions where did we come form, why are we here, and where are we going. These answers are built on a mountain of evidence. These answers aren't compatible with Mormonism. Not at all.

There are still any number of unanswered questions, but the domains for those questions are limited. Given what we now know, there is nothing that science could be wrong about that makes room for the Mormon God.

Perhaps the best you could do is some sort of blend between Mormonism, humanism, and pantheism. In this view, "God" doesn't exist, except in the sense that God is the collection of all of us, and an ideal to which we are striving. In this view, we are hanging out with God because we are hanging out with each other. From this view, we could evolve to become Gods--we could figure out the technology to live forever and turn earth into a Celestial sphere. From this paradigm, it isn't unreasonable to suppose that Homo Sapiens will evolve into Homo Deus--where we actually design ourselves to be the God-like beings we want to be. But if this happens, it is something that we do ourselves. An imaginary Homo Deus from an imaginary planet near Kolob could serve as the inspiration for this, but that being on that planet is fictional. We can be absolutely sure that a creature from that world wouldn't genetically be anything like us. We have earth genes--not Kolob genes.

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I'm really hoping this thread just goes full-on Space Opera. *fingers crossed*

- Doc

[_Philo Sofee]

One thing that has bothered me is HOW can WE be made in God's human image, when it wasn't on this earth that God got a body?! We KNOW our bodies evolved from evolved organisms HERE on OUR earth, during a specific TIME. But if God and his dad and granddad and so on back ALL had the same kind of bodies....... the odds of that evolutionarily are outrageously enormous. It just couldn't have happened throughout the cosmos, since, so far as we can gather, the forces on this earth due to size, location in relation to other spheroids, etc., made pressure evolutionary for EARTH kinds of bodies. In other words, there is no probability worth believing that the God's bodies going back billions of years came to be like ours and then they imagined this was the best form to create and put their children's spirits into. That is insanely silly when one recognizes it took THIS earth over 4 billion years to get to us. But the universe isn't old enough to have evolved all the God's bodies back through time from eternal generations ago. It all simply doesn't make sense in any way once we realize the history of our earth and cosmos.

Now then, with multiverses......cough, cough........ the LDS have a way out of this conundrum.

[_RockSlider]

One thing ...

It's ok Philo, take a deep breath, lean back, relax, click on the following link, close your eyes and let me reconnect you to your indoctrination, it will quit hurting when you quit fighting it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOrcqqpHCt8

[_mentalgymnast]

Maybe MG has taken to reading Nietzsche lately?

lololololol just kidding #hedoesntread

- Doc

Yay Doc.

Score.

Regards,
MG