"Theist": is a Transitional Form In Human Cultural/Cognitive Evolution

Christian theism was not an invention of the minds of men as part of his cognitive-cultural evolution. Rather, it is a revelation from God, supported by empirical, historical facts. At Mark 13:32 Jesus speaks of his God as "the Father." He preached in his Father"s name, and was believed by his disciples to reveal God the Father more fully to us. (John 1:18) If it is one historical fact that about Jesus which no historian denies, its that he was indeed crucified. If indeed, Christ did rise from the dead, it seems that we have a divine miracle on our hands, confirming his claims about the reality, and the revelation of the God who sent him. Now there are the facts which are agreed upon by the majority of New Testament historians, both Christian and non-Christian, which imply the reality of the resurrection. These facts are: (1) On the third day after his crucifixion, Jesus" tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers. "In first-century Judaism, women had low social status and no legal right to serve as witnesses. If the empty tomb were an invented legend, its inventors surely would not have had it discovered by women, whose testimony was considered worthless. If, on the other hand, the writers were simply reporting what they saw, they would have to tell the truth, however socially and legally inconvenient." (Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft, Fr. Ronald Tacelli, SJ, 1994, Chap 8, Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ, A Challenge to Skeptics) (2) After his crucifixion, the disciples experienced appearances of him alive from the dead. The is no psychological condition which could explain these appearances. "There were too many witnesses. Hallucinations are private, individual, subjective. Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, to the disciples minus Thomas, to the disciples including Thomas, to the two disciples at Emmaus, to the fisherman on the shore, to James (his "brother" or cousin), and even to five hundred people at once (1 Cor 15:3-8). Even three different witnesses are enough for a kind of psychological trigonometry; over five hundred is about as public as you can wish. And Paul says in this passage (v. 6) that most of the five hundred are still alive, inviting any reader to check the truth of the story by questioning the eyewitnesses -- he could never have done this and gotten away with it, given the power, resources and numbers of his enemies, if it were not true." (3) The disciples came to believe that Jesus was risen from the dead despite having every reason not to do so. Their leader was killed on charges of blasphemy, and Jews had no belief in anyone rising to eternal life before the general resurrection at the end of the world, so it couldn"t have come from Jewish influence; but it couldn"t have come from Christian influence because there was no Christianity as such as yet. In the absence of any rational, naturalistic explanation of these three events; the Christian is amply justified in believing that God raised Jesus from the dead. But that would mean that God did reveal himself to the world in the person of Jesus Christ, which invalidates Pro"s argument that such ideas about God are just erroneous ideas developed through the egotism of man as part of his evolution. The evidence shows that wider theism outside Christianity, as well as animism and polytheism, are products, not of evolution, but the interaction of the supernatural with the physical world. Pro seems to think that theism came into being after polytheism, but theism doesn"t deny the existence of other supernatural beings that are worshipped as gods. Christian monotheism for example, says there is only one God to be worshipped, but thought it regards Satan as a false god, nevertheless, it regards him as a living being which is worshipped. So likewise even in polytheism, while allowing for the worship of many gods, doesn"t deny the existence of a Supreme Being above all other gods. Theism appears even in the most ancient documents we have. The Egyptian god Nebercher was regarded as the first Creator of all other gods and even the universe (The Book of Apep, translated in The Gods of the Egyptians, vol 1, pp.308-321, Sir E.A. Wallis Budge), so that belief in theism or belief in God or gods is as old as written language. Unless Pro can show there was a time when humans didn"t believe in gods, he can"t show this belief to have evolved. But he can"t go beyond the oldest documents we have. Since my opponent mentioned language at the beginning of his argument, I will also argue that the historical facts regarding language indicate that humanity"s original ancient languages did not evolve naturally, but were given to us by God. If language had evolved from simple grunts of animals to more complex language as we have today, one would logically expect to see languages becoming more complex as time goes on. But rather, it"s a fact that ancient languages are more complex than modern ones; languages are becoming more simplified. Language studies show that the more ancient the language the more complex it is in terms of syntax, tense, gender, mood, case, verb forms, and inflection. This is true of Old Latin 200 B.C.; Greek 800 B.C. and the Sanskrit of the Vedas 1500 B.C. (David C. C. Watson, The Great Brain Robbery, 1976, pp. 83"89) "Yet it is incredible that the first language could have been the most complex." (George Gaylord Simpson, Biology and Man, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969, p. 116) "The evolution of language, at least within the historical period, is a story of progressive simplification." Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, 2nd edition, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1957, p. 10) For example, words in the Hebrew mental lexicon have are organized by morphology, by their root families rather than by simple letter sequences as with modern English. (Frost, 2009; Frost et al., 1997). Case is the function of a word within a sentence. Latin nouns, pronouns and adjectives are marked for case which allows varied word orders without changing the meaning of the sentence. English has very little case and relies on word order to indicate meaning or function of a word within a sentence: Here the boy is seeing, and the goat is the object being seen by the boy. Here the goat is seeing, and the boy is the object being seen by the goat. The spelling and grammar is exactly the same, yet the word order changes the meaning of the sentence. Because the nouns are marked for case in Latin, this change in word order doesn"t change the meaning of the sentence. These case marking seem hard to learn to a non-Latin speaker, but they guard against ambiguity. English is restrictive in terms of how we can reword a sentence. Latin is more flexible. Latin has both natural and grammatical gender while English only has natural gender. The oldest written documents on earth, such as The Legend of Etana and the Kesh Temple Hymn from 2600 B.C.E., and the 2400 B.C.E. Pyramid Texts all draw allusions or direct references to gods, creators, or divine beings, and are all already complete, complex languages. No ancient document has ever been found with a simple language; so language didn"t evolve from simple beginnings; it was complex from the start, and way back then people believed in gods. "The so-called primitive languages can throw no light on language origins, since most of them are actually more complicated in grammar than the tongues spoken by civilized peoples." (Ralph Linton, The Tree of Culture, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957, p. 9) Finally, Christian theism puts not man, but God at the center of it all, and our lives revolve around him; so why does Pro call theism egotistical? It can't be egotism to believe in a loving God if indeed he exists. If he doesn't, at worst one is deluded, but not egotistical. I turn it over to Pro.