>>You go first — When you know you are just one or two heart beats away from the end of your life and you are taking your last breaths, and you know the end is near — Who are you praying to, “an organism or to God?”<<
I don’t mind going first.
I am blessed to have had a personal experience with God and while I have many problems in life doubt about God is not one of them.
What I am trying to ask in this vanity is that for people who think that man was first on this planet in his current form - would it really change anything if it turned out that biologically he had come from lower life forms? Wouldn’t God still be God with the same love and wouldn’t man still have the same goals?
Well, IMO, you are the person that can answer that question for yourself. Faith is very personal.
I have a hard time reconciling that with Gen 2:7 “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. “
Age of the earth and 6 day creation aside, Scripture is so clear about God creating man as a separate act of creation, as with the other forms of life being created.
More later when I can think a little more clearly. This is too early for me.....
If Genesis had described the creation of man in the way you posit, everything else that follows from God loving man, man’s sin and rebellion, and Christ’s death would be true. But Genesis describes man as being more or less directly “hand-made” by God. No evolutionary antecedents! God breathed life directly into man’s nostrils. he became a living soul.
The described previous creation “cycles” paints God as being a bit more stand offish, “Let the Earth bring forth...” and so on implying Divine command and imputed power with matter and energy rippling, crackling and “bringing forth” in response to God’s word! It could be argued it took a long time for some of these commands to “bring forth” as it were.
Yet you asked about the creation of man in possible relation to previous evolutionary antecedents. Genesis doesn’t allow you that kind of wiggle room.God’s relationship with man was intimate and unique, he was given tasks to tend the Garden of Eden and to name the aninmals.
God had a personal and even emotional stake in his interations with Adam. The events describing Adam and Eve and the introduction of sin into the world directly lead, thru some thousands of years, to the coming of Christ the King of YOUR salvation(you did describe your self a Christian).
If anything, there has been devolution for as you ought to have learned by now what Paul says”The whole of creation groans under a curse as in labor” that curse being sin! Now note what he says...”the whole of creation” meaning Earth, planets, stars,galaxies, everything!
Now God will lift that curse someday and all matter and creation will express the maximum of their designed capabilities, including man!(”If a man dies before 100 years old, he will be said to have been cursed” as the Old Testament says) You think the giant redwoods are actually expressing their total potentials; well perhaps they are in this present diseased matrix of matter/energy we call creation. Just think of what they’ll be like when God lifts the curse of sin and death off of the universe!