Did God Evolve? An Evolutionist's Speculation about Religion - Professor Steve Jones

Did God Evolve? www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
Ideas and beliefs evolve as much as do bodies and brains and in some ways the two processes are similar. A survey of world religions, both now and in the past, shows some interesting consistencies, with a clear fit between levels of belief and degrees of social inequality.
From the beginning, particular faiths have been - as Darwin showed for bodies - driven by demographic success, and Christianity at least is safe, since its believers reproduce far more effectively than do we atheists.
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and...
Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: gresham.ac.uk/support/

[@crobulari2328]

I do not know if God evolved but God is there all right. After all us humans created him.

[@seanchaney3086]

Man created misrepresentations of their True Creator.

[@jacksonwaltersmcdonald1787]

God can only be found in art (human reflection of our own god given godliness)/language and science(language+art)And in human connection and relations

[@impossibleexperiments]

Very interesting, start to finish.

[@doncourtreporter]

Apparently "God" evolved in man's mythology.

[@FlockOfHawks]

"Evolution is a series of successful mistakes" (22:15) That sums it up quite well i'd say . Religions don't change through mistakes , but mainly by determined people who dare to ask fundamental questions , and often pay for their brave endeavours with their lives . Religion is the arch enemy of progress , providing simple answers for fundamental questions , and dumbing people down in order to maintain a status quo that suits the ones in power .

[@BIGWUNuvDbunch]

Yeah, the title choice was poor: it invites people to ignore the lecture and infer it's contents, but the lecture was quite interesting as always.

[@rickdavi111]

I'm rather surprised by SJ's analysis of Africa in relation to religion. He seems to think that Christianity in one form or another is the dominant force there, whereas Islam is widespread, particularly in highly-populous sub-Saharan countries.

[@FlockOfHawks]

as it is in europe

[@Doorsfan13]

The Judaeo-Christian Creator that appears in Genesis does indeed evolve throughout the text: Gen 1:1 reads "In the beginning God," this is Elohim - "Powers;" this is actually the plural of Eloah. After the seven-day creation, in Gen 2:4, we read "the Lord God" - this is Yahweh-Elohim, "He Exists" of "Powers;" this then alternates according to context, finally becoming "Lord" - "Yahweh" - for the Flood of Noah. For this reason one will hear of Elohist or Yahwist passages in the Bible. For those who desire an evolving (or evolved) Deity, it is suggestible that one explore the Zohar of the Jews. :)

[@SeanMauer]

The Hildegard of Bingen's vision of falling stars cast into the abyss is consistent with the biblical lexicon of figurative language.

[@educatedmanholecoverbyrich8890]

I'll be speaking with Odin about Mr Jones.

[@rahowhero]

My source says that it went proto European to Germanic to north, west, east Germanic, then Gothic from east Germanic, then extinction.

[@rahowhero]

Proto indo european

[@MoerreNoseshine]

WATCH THE VIDEO BEFORE DOWNVOTING - THIS IS NOT WHAT YOU THINK!!!! Quote from the first minute "WHAT PREDISPOSES some people to be religious". Get it? This is about PEOPLE, about genetics, about science. Not about "god". The professor is a geneticist and an atheist. Gresham: You brought this upon yourself. Be careful with those titles... lots of people vote after reading the title.

[@rahowhero]

Well the recent vid on 'spirituality' was absolute bollox, people may be unaware that Q in title is rhetoric.

[@DonaldKronos]

Michael Hasenstein I'm curious whether you watched the entire video before making that comment, because I'm through 51 minutes of it so far (out of 53 total) and so far it has been mostly about evolution or religion, society, and language, with very little about the evolution of biology and even less about genetics. I'm about to give it a thumbs-up. Haven't done that yet, because I stopped to type this. But I am curious also what it was that you assumed people would think about it before watching it. There are many videos on the evolution of religion on KZbin, and I'm starting a playlist of some of them, but there are also videos claiming falsely that evolution is a religion... which obviously it's not. But religions do in fact evolve, and even have descent with modification, although not all evolution does include that feature. Evolution is simply the process of change being accumulated or rolled out. Descent with modification is one of the methods of change accumulating, and is a vital part of the Theory of Evolution in the scientific field of biology, which also depends heavily on selection processes such as natural selection or selection for domestication.

[@DonaldKronos]

Michael Hasenstein Well, this video lost my thumbs up that I was about to give and I will be removing this video from the playlist I'm making, due to the anti-science closing statement at the end of the video.

[@MoerreNoseshine]

Donald Kronos If you don't see the science in the lecture I cannot help you. Feel free to go elsewhere. "> due to the anti-science closing statement at the end of the video." Which one would that be? You make accusations without being specific. Typical sign of a jerk. "Anti science statement" - from Steve Jones - LOL.

[@DonaldKronos]

Michael Hasenstein at 52:44 -- Quote: "[...]what the university should be teaching now is not a new generation of scientists and biologists, but a new generation of theologians." Yes, that's anti-science. And if you look at my original comment, you should notice that I was about to give the video a thumbs-up and include it in a list I was working on, until that anti-science plug for religion came along.

[@zachrowell6795]

A theory that I came up with in the past months is that the reason there is a vast dry band of desert and arid land from Western Africa all the way east through the Middle East and finally on to the Mongolian plateau is that these were the first farmlands that our ancestors learned to cultivate tens of thousands of years ago. Since they likely did not have particularly sustainable farming techniques and they continued to farm these lands continuously for thousands of years on end, they more or less permanently exhausted the soils. These first farmers may not have understood the consequences of mass deforestation, vast monoculture plantations, and neglected the restorative practices of compost and mulch. Funny enough, this is what our modern agriculture is doing at this very moment at equally large scales around the world. I fear that there will not be a pleasant end to our modern society sometime in the future if we continue feeding ourselves in such a destructive way.

[@SeanMauer]

Hey, where' the Chinese language in the PIE tree? It seems that the Tower of Babel is the meta reality for language differences and the PIE tree is only a local phenomenon.

[@papermaniac]

Chinese is not indoerupean language

[@brucey5232]

God evolved from a Leprechaun ancestor.

[@rahowhero]

Did god evolve? Haven't watched vid yet, but assume that is rhetorical..,. Mind you last vid on 'spirituality' was a let down, and not worthy of this good school, so we shall see.....

[@elfootman]

God does evolve, it's a meme

[@abelchavez5647]

when Humans evolve , God de-evolves, when God de-evolves , humans Evolve ..maybe we are so connected to it that we can somehow alter it but under restrictions but as a whole we can ..

[@kalebpheiff2147]

God exists only because we as humanity believe in him we praise him like he's done great things we love him because we have the belief he created us and we love being alive but God will die if we stop loving him he will stop existing just the same as if a mother didn't love her new born baby hate and neglect is what can kill God it can kill anything which is why we as humans hate to be hated and neglected because it can and will kill at some point or another and eventually everything starts to get neglected which is why things die so God is not eternal if he is neglected by his creation he created his creation so he could exist and that's why he throws us to the pits if we don't believe because he needs us to believe so he can exist just as any other creature needs someone to believe in them to exist we exist because we believe it so God evolved just like everything else and he made us evolve the same as he did and he destroyed Lucifer because he found out the truth God failed to perfection he didn't get it right on the first try

[@martynfenton4862]

I see yet another privalaged lecturer sliding politics in as facts near the end

[@acabramzach]

"Professor" Jones should have studied history of religion before making this lecture. The Sumerians 10,000 years ago created agriculture, writhig, the wheel, the first cyties, and the religion that have copied and inverted to nomadic form some Cananites 8.000 years later that will become the Bible that Jones today calls "religion". Sorry but the Bible is a regression of agriculture symbolism back to the stone age. Not an evolution, but a regression. The jewish Bible is strictly political and has nothing to do with religion. Only good for cave men.

[@ftumschk]

The Sumerians were a different people than the Canaanites, so whilst religion may have "evolved" later amongst the latter, that doesn't mean it didn't "evolve". There's nothing in evolution that precludes features evolving at different rates between different populations. Compared to the early, polytheistic Canaanites, the later, monotheistic Jews were, in a sense, more highly "evolved".

[@acabramzach]

The jewish god YAWEH is one of the sumerian gods. It was the local god in Canaa. Every region had it's god. Nobody "evolved" to monotheism. They simply modified him to fit their nomadic way of life (Abel and Cain story). A local god.