[betty boop]

Interesting - you used "evolution"....I suppose we can also say that God has "evolved" as well...from the worship of gods of fire, war, etc....

I don't think we can say that, Raven, unless you imagine (after Feuerbach and Marx) that God is only a construct or projection of the human imagination; i.e., a comforting fiction. If we want to speak of fiction here, we need to explain the persistence and universality of this particular fiction. For the earliest clear signs of religious imagination date back some forty-two millennia; e.g., the Lascaux cave paintings in the French Pyrenees.... plus we would have to account for the sheer universality of religious belief and experience ever since.

I imagine that it makes no sense at all to apply "evolution" -- a temporal process -- to a Being Who is not in time (i.e., God is eternal).

What I think we can say, however, is the way human beings symbolize God "evolves"....

[Alamo-Girl]

Indeed. All excellent points! Thank you so much for the ping!

[marron]

What I think we can say, however, is the way human beings symbolize God "evolves"....

I prefer to use the word "dynamic" but I recognize that the word could not be properly applied to a God who is outside space-time. But viewed from our side of the divide dynamic might best describe it, it would look like that to us.

To continue with a thought I have pursued in another context, the two notions, that God controls the future, and that men are free agents, can only be reconciled if God is engaged in the here and now. Some have written that if God is engaged in the world then human freedom is negated, but I see it as precisely the reverse. He can absorb all of the uncertainties introduced by his human and very fallible, very inventive, and very idiosyncratic crew by remaining engaged.

[unspun]

What I think we can say, however, is the way human beings symbolize God "evolves"....

...or "devolves," as the case may be.

Such devolution is the way of the world. It is only by direct intervention that such relational, spiritual, passionate, and intellectual entropy is overcome, by God. Yes bb, such is the way, of energy, isn't it? When there is a disconnection with its source, energy inexorably dissipates, just as knowledge is distorted and lost in our world's various religious "telephone games."

May all our batteries be so charged. Such things as batteries and other capacitors are pretty useless, otherwise.

A capacitor for God is a very, very terrible thing to waste.