Biologists Confirm God Evolved From Chimpanzee Deity

[FWS]

Biologists Confirm God Evolved From Chimpanzee Deity

The Onion
ISSUE 50•14 • Apr 10, 2014

Researchers say today’s Lord Almighty shares many traits in common with the chimp deity, including color vision and omniscience.



BERKELEY, CA—Challenging long-held views on the origins of divinity, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, presented findings Thursday that confirm God, the Almighty Creator of the Universe, evolved from an ancient chimpanzee deity.

The recently discovered sacred ancestor, a divine chimp species scientists have named Pan sanctorum, reportedly gave rise over millions of years to the Lord Our God, Maker of Heaven and Earth.

“Although perhaps not obvious at first glance, there are actually overwhelming similarities between the Supreme Being of today and this early primate deity who preceded Him,” said Dr. Richard Kamen, a leading biologist who also heads Berkeley’s paleotheology department. “The holy chimp moved around on all fours, but its descendants eventually began walking upright to expend less energy while foraging across the infinite reaches of the universe. This of course led to the bipedalism of modern-day God.”

“In fact, you can see a distinct likeness to God in the chimpanzee deity’s skeletal structures, not to mention its prototypical expressions of vengeance and wrath,” Kamen continued. “The great-ape god was, however, considerably smaller in stature, having not yet developed the capacity to occupy all space and time simultaneously.”

According to experts, divine life began as a single-celled all-powerful organism roughly 3.6 billion years ago, eventually evolving into a multicelled, sponge-like deity that bobbed and floated across the chaos of the early universe. Kamen explained that over hundreds of millions of years, the godlike life form became more complex, with limbs that allowed for locomotion across the endless expanse of the heavens, and sophisticated photoreceptor cells capable of seeing all things.

Based on newly obtained evidence, the Pan sanctorum is thought to have first experimented with creation ex nihilo around 7 million years ago. Kamen noted that the chimpanzee deity made several early attempts to produce rudimentary solar systems, but on each occasion was spooked upon inadvertently creating fire, which is said to have caused it to screech loudly, angrily swat away the newly formed sun, and then scamper across the universe to hide from the flaming sphere.

“Natural selection played a huge role in the evolution of divinity, and in this regard, the adaptive value of Pan sanctorum’s immortality proved critical to its survival,” said Kamen, adding that with its opposable thumbs, the divine ancestor was eventually able to fashion primitive tools for creating crude oceans and basic mountain ranges. “Today’s Lord Almighty actually still has a small bony protuberance in the small of His back, the vestigial remains of a tail we believe was used by an even older, monkey-like god to facilitate climbing, allowing it to escape into the heavens when faced with danger.”

“That potential for threats made it an evolutionary imperative for the primate god to develop omnipotence,” Kamen continued. “As well as sharp claws and pointed incisors.”

Though its smaller brain limited its cognitive abilities, the chimpanzee deity is believed to have possessed not only self-awareness, but also spatial intelligence, object permanence, and a rudimentary capacity for knowing all that is, all that has been, and all that ever will be.

However, it was only relatively recently that the heavenly species developed the intellectual capacity for higher reasoning, critical thinking, and infinite wisdom, according to Kamen. For Pan sanctorum, he noted, the passage of divine judgment was “purely a matter of primal instinct.”

“While complex speech would not emerge until the evolution of the Cro-Magnon god from Pan Sanctorum, the chimpanzee deity was capable of using grunts and hand gestures to convey basic emotions such as happiness, anger, or the forgiveness of sin,” Kamen said. “However, it appears that the chimp deity often exhibited extremely aggressive behavior, in some cases unleashing its divine wrath with little if any provocation toward the mortal chimps it created in its own image.”

He added, “It is our understanding that these creatures lived in a kind of jungle-like forerunner to the Garden of Eden, until a day came when their enraged creator cast them out, flinging feces at them as they fled.”

[trappincoyotes39]

From Berkeley nothing else is needed to say

[James]

Apr 11, 2014 20:36:08 GMT -6 trappincoyotes39 said:

From Berkeley nothing else is needed to say

Been taking Yoda lessons we are? lol

Jim

[FWS]

From Berkeley nothing else is needed to say

Actually it's from 'The Onion' so it's satirical.

Besides, you can't disprove that God evolved from a chimpanzee deity.

And what would you really know about UC Berkeley anyways ? That it's one of the finest research universities in the world ? Because it is.

[trappincoyotes39]

I have no doubt Berkeley is a fine college, I also have no doubt it is one of the most Liberal colleges in the world as well, enough said. I wonder how many times the onion has been sued by people For Making up lies? I did notice the Berkeley press picked this up quickly I am sure it was top news of the day for people to know

[trappnman]

here's The Onion............

www.theonion.com/

I always find it entertaining-

[FWS]

I did notice the Berkeley press picked this up quickly

Because they enjoy satire, as do I and apparently Trappnman.

I wonder how many times the onion has been sued by people For Making up lies?

Perhaps due to the fact that the fool who's suing will look like a complete idiot for suing over what is unquestionably a satirical piece.

Still though, you can't provide any evidence that God does not have ancient primate diety ancestors.

Which would make sense given that God supposedly created man in his own image and we do know that modern humans (Homo sapiens) are descended from ancient primate ancestors.

[trappincoyotes39]

Provided that satire fits into your bias, I suppose very one does love satire to some degree.........

So god created man and the monkeys created god OK? What a transformation from a monkey to God..................



The Bible makes the claim that humans alone are "created in the image of God."1 What exactly does this mean? Some have equated the image of God as being the physical characteristics of our bodies that make up the way we look. In fact, the Mormons have taken this interpretation to extreme by saying that God is just an exalted man, who has "a body of flesh and bones."1 However, the Bible says that both males and females are created in the image of God.2 Unless God were a hermaphrodite (having both male and female sexual organs), this phrase could not refer to just physical characteristics. In addition, there are various verses in the Bible that describe God as having non-human physical characteristics, such as feathers and wings.3 Should we think of God as being an overgrown chicken? Certainly not! God is so unlike humans physically, that the Bible often paints word pictures to give us a glimpse of what God is like.

Creativity
So if the "image of God" does not refer to physical characteristics, what does it refer to? It is certainly likely that part of the "image of God" refers to the ability of humans to be creative. Anthropology tells us that sophisticated works of art first appeared in the fossil record about 40,000-50,000 years ago,4 at the time that moderns humans first appeared. No other species of animal, including the apes, are able to create and understand images of art and drawing.

Consciousness
Human consciousness is a mystery that has evaded decades of intensive research by neurophysiologists. According to a recent article:

When an organism's neural pathways grow sufficiently complex, materialists insist, their firings are somehow accompanied by consciousness. But despite decades of effort by philosophers and neurophysiologists, no one has been able to come up with a remotely plausible explanation of how this happens--how the hunk of gray meat in our skull gives rise to private Technicolor experience. One distinguished commentator on the mind-body problem, Daniel Dennett, author of Consciousness Explained, has been driven to declare that there is really no such thing as consciousness--we are all zombies, though we're unaware of it.5

Personality
Another thing that makes humans unique is personality. According to Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University:

"We have no idea how our brains make us who we are. There is as yet no neuroscience of personality. We have little understanding of how art and history are experienced by the brain. The meltdown of mental life in psychosis is still a mystery. In short, we have yet to come up with a theory that can pull all this together."6

Abstract thinking
Is the human brain that much different from that of our closest "relatives," the chimpanzees? According to Daniel J. Povinelli, from the University of Louisiana's New Iberia Research Center

"Humans constantly invoke unobservable phenomena and variables to explain why certain things are happening. Chimps operate in the world of concrete, tangible things that can be seen. The content of their minds is about the observable world."7

Insight into how chimpanzees really think can be seen in some recent experiments performed by Dr. Povinelli. In these experiments, the researchers used the chimps' natural begging gesture to examine how they really think about their world. They confronted the chimps with two familiar experimenters, one offering a piece of food and the other holding out an undesirable block of wood. As expected, the chimps had no trouble distinguishing between the block and the food and immediately gestured to the experimenter offering the food. Next, the researchers wanted to see if the chimps would be able to choose between a person who could see them and a person who could not. If the chimpanzees understood how other animals see, they would gesture only to the person who could see them. The researchers achieved the "seeing/not-seeing" contrast by having the two experimenters adopt different postures. In one test, one experimenter wore a blindfold over her eyes while the other wore a blindfold over her mouth. In the other tests, one of the experimenters wore a bucket over her head, placed her hands over her eyes or sat with her back turned to the chimpanzee. All these postures were modeled after the behaviors that had been observed during the chimpanzees' spontaneous play. The results of the experiments were astonishing. In the tests involving blindfolds, buckets and hands over the eyes--the apes entered the lab and paused but then were just as likely to gesture to the person who could not see them as to the person who could. In several cases, the chimps gestured to the person who could not see them and then, when nothing happened, gestured again, as if puzzled by the fact that the experimenter did not respond. In the case of experimenters facing with their backs to the chimps, they performed as if they knew that those facing way from them could not see and offer them food. However, subsequent experiments proved that the chimps had merely responded to conditioning from the initial experiments, since they had only received food from those experimenters who faced them. This was proven by having experimenters facing away from the chimps, but then turning to look over their shoulders. The chimps were just as likely to gesture to the experimenters facing away as the one who turned to look at them. Chimpanzees have no clue that humans must face them in order to see. It is obvious from these experiments that chimpanzees lack even a simple understanding of how their world works, but merely react to conditioning from directly observable events.8

Other researchers have noted that chimpanzees do not understand the cause and effect of their actions. Apes will climb onto a box to reach fruit, but if the box is absent, will place on the ground beneath the fruit a sheet of paper and stand upon it.9

A more recent study examined the ability of human infants and young chimpanzees to help human adults.10 18-month-old human infants and young chimpanzees were presented with four categories of problems: out-of-reach objects, access thwarted by a physical obstacle, achieving a wrong (correctable) result, and using a wrong (correctable) means. While human infants could perform all four tasks, chimpanzees could only perform the first task. As in previous studies, chimpanzees were unable to discern when an individual failed at a simple task and how he could help. The researchers concluded:

"A number of theorists have claimed that human beings cooperate with one another and help one another (especially non-kin) in ways not found in other animal species (26–28). This is almost certainly so, and the current results demonstrate that even very young children have a natural tendency to help other persons solve their problems, even when the other is a stranger and they receive no benefit at all."10

Body, soul, spirit
Besides the rather obvious differences in the way animals process information in their brains, the Bible (and science) confirm that there are major differences in the ways humans make moral judgments (animals don't make such judgments, as we shall see). Part of what is meant by the term "in the image of God" can be found in chapters immediately following its first usage (Genesis 1) in the Bible. Both Adam and Eve had a personal relationship with God in the Garden of Eden. Such a personal relationship is not described, nor seen, for any other animal species. It is the presence of a spirit that was instilled into humans11 that separates us from the animals. There are three kinds of life that God has created in this universe:

Creature: Examples:
Body only Lower life forms, including reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates
Body and soul From the Hebrew nephesh, or soulish creatures, including birds and mammals
Body, soul and spirit Humans12 and angels
The soul is best described as the characteristics that make up the advanced brain, including mind, will and emotion. Only birds and mammals exhibit these characteristics, which is why humans can form mutual relationships with birds and mammals.

Spirit
The spirit is that part of humans that is able to love and experience God directly.13 It is found in no other animal species, since no other species can experience God or form a relationship with Him.14 Is there any evidence that humans possess a spirit? Recent attempts have been aimed at trying to identify the part of the brain involved in "religious" experiences. Unfortunately, the current studies are restricted to an examination of meditative experiences,15 since the specific subjects used in the research were Tibetan Buddhist meditators. During meditation, the goal is to completely divorce oneself from external sensory stimulation. The ability to do so, apparently leads to some sense of "oneness with the universe", since the brain is deprived of sensory input while still remaining active.

The leaders of these studies, Andrew Newberg M.D., Eugene G. D'Aquili Ph.D., and Vince Rause, claim to have discovered the biological basis for belief in God.16 However, according to Daniel Batson, a University of Kansas psychologist:

"The brain is the hardware through which religion is experienced. To say the brain produces religion is like saying a piano produces music."15

The problem with the theory is that such "religious" experiences do not apply to Christianity, although Newberg tries to make the connection through the reported experiences of a few Christian mysticists. The plain fact is that Christianity does not teach any kind of meditation that leads to the kind of experiences taught in the Eastern religions. Even in prayer, I have never experienced the kind of things described as occurring during Buddhist meditation. God does answer my prayers, but the answer is in the form of fully formed, specific ideas - not any kind of "oneness with the universe". Any kind of non-specific feelings would be completely useless, since it does not provide advice that would be necessary to help one's spiritual walk with God.

Even if there were an area of the brain that might be involved in religious experiences, this idea does not prove that God is a creation of our brains. If God did create us, we would expect that He would provide a means by which we could experience Him. This area of the brain might be part of God's design to make us realize that we are more than just physical creatures. The Bible says that God has given us this knowledge of eternity, possibly involving some sort of "hard-wired" knowledge.17

Moral judgments
After Adam and Eve had sinned, they became like God in that they could distinguish good from evil.18 The ability to make moral judgments is also a characteristics that is found only in humans. Even the higher apes cannot make moral judgments about the behavior of other animals. As Dr. Jerome Kagan points out in Three Seductive Ideas, "Not even the cleverest ape could be conditioned to be angry upon seeing one animal steal food from another."19 In addition, there are no non-human animal models for human pride, shame, and guilt.20 Recent studies have also shown that only humans, among the primates, are capable of certain forms of sin. Although a chimpanzee will exact revenge against another chimpanzee that steals food from him, they are not spiteful, no matter how researchers tried to elicit the response.21 Even dominant male chimpanzees will not punish or prevent a chimpanzee from stealing food from another. Christianity says humans alone are in need of redemption because of their sin.

Social skills and learning
An experiment was designed to test the hypothesis that humans have special skills in social cognition.22 Two and one half year old human toddlers were tested against adult chimpanzees and orangutans for cognitive abilities in spatial, quantitative, and causality processing, along with social cognitive abilities in social learning, communication, and theory of mind (gaze following and understanding intentions). Although toddler humans and adult apes had about the same capabilities in spatial observation, counting, and causality, humans were far superior in areas of social cognition. In social learning, humans averaged close to 100%, whereas apes averaged less than 5%. The study discredits the general intelligence hypothesis that human cognition differs from that of apes only in general cognitive processes such as memory, learning, or perceptual processing. Immature human brains operate quite differently from those of mature apes, suggesting that there are some fundamental differences in the structure and/or function of human brains. Evolutionary theory would claim that these markedly enhanced social skills were just due to some random mutations that conferred some kind of survival advantage, even though the supposed ancestors of human beings lived in habitats similar to those of the great apes. However, the Bible says that humans were designed to be different from all other animals, especially in their ability to excel at social learning and communication.

Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems likely that "in the image of God" refers to the characteristics of the human spirit and the ability to make moral judgments - things that are not found in any animal species, even those to whom we are said to be closely related. Even evolutionists are beginning to recognize the uniqueness of human beings. Dr. Ian Tattersall, in Becoming Human - Evolution and Human Uniqueness, says humans represent a "totally unprecedented entity" on Earth, and "Homo sapiens is not simply an improved version of its ancestors - it's a new concept." It is the ability to make moral judgments that convinces us of our inability to "measure up" to the intended moral standards laid down by God.23 However, it is the spirit of man that allows us to communicate with God's Spirit through Jesus Christ24 so that we can once again be in fellowship with a Holy God25 and experience the ultimate relationship in the universe.

[FWS]

Provided that satire fits into your bias,

Why would it have to ?

[PamIsMe]

Quoting the Bible to refute something said by The Onion is about as pointless an exercise as I can think of.
IMHO It's on the same level as quoting Aesop's Fables to refute Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales.

Cheers,
Pam

[trappincoyotes39]

FWS why would you read satire against your beliefs and think it is funny? Well some can do that and others take things way too seriously to allow themselves to do such

Pam not just the bible that post was reference to what FWS stated and it had far more than biblical quotes in it, it showed research showing the difference between apes and humans. A message as inside of all that reading

[FWS]

FWS why would you read satire against your beliefs and think it is funny?

Why would I not ? And why would you not ? Too uptight maybe ?

it showed research showing the difference between apes and humans

And what about the similarities ?

You'll need to research church teachings on the subject of human evolution................

[mostinterestingmanintheworld]

Ya the first two words caused me to quit reading.

[trappincoyotes39]

FWS trust me if I was uptight I would have quit posting on this part of the forum long ago . In fact I like to take the opposite point of view on many things because I do have fun with it and it also fits my belief system better many times not all though

[FWS]

if I was uptight

If ?