7. The Creation Of Man Series

IN GOD'S IMAGE 7 - THE CREATION OF MAN

This message is part of a series of 90 sermons based on the title, “In God’s Image – God’s Purpose for humanity.” This series of free sermons or the equivalent free book format is designed to take the reader through an amazing process beginning with God in prehistory and finishing with humanity joining God in eternity as His loving sons and daughters. It is at times, a painful yet fascinating story, not only for humanity, but also for God. As the sermons follow a chronological view of the story of salvation, it is highly recommend they be presented in numerical order rather than jumping to the more “interesting” or “controversial” subjects as the material builds on what is presented earlier. We also recommend reading the introduction prior to using the material. The free book version along with any graphics or figures mentioned in this series can be downloaded at www.ingodsimage.site - Gary Regazzoli

Last time we finished with God restoring the earth in preparation for the creation of man.

• However we need to remind ourselves that in spite of an environment that was infested with evil influences, God is in complete control of the process whereby his special creation, man, would eventually blossom into the image of God.

• This is where we now pick up the story.

• Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” 27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

• In our earlier session on creation we talked about two amazing realities that makes life on earth possible.

• First was the precise positioning of the earth in the so-called habitable “Goldilocks” zone, and secondarily the unexplained miraculous appearance of life itself on the planet.

• Now we encounter another extraordinary event that defies our understanding, and that is, “human consciousness”.

• Understanding how our brain causes human consciousness is the holy grail of both philosophy and neuroscience and has challenged philosophers from pre-Socratic times.

• The challenge has been to understand the relationship between the physical and the mental.

• In his opening statement from his first lecture on Mind, Body and Questions of Consciousness, Professor Patrick Grim outlines the hard problem of consciousness for philosophers and neuroscientists.

“How do our physical brains produce our subjective experience? If we opened up your skull we would find about three pounds of grey matter. Look closer and we would find distinct layers within the folded grey mass. Look even closer and we would find an unfathomably complex tangle of specialized cells, but that’s all we’d find, three pounds of matter.

Okay, I’ve told you what we would find if we opened your skull. Now you tell me what you find when you open your eyes? You open your eyes in the morning and you see the glow of the sun streaming in the window. You feel the warmth on your cheeks. You hear the chatter of birds outside. Perhaps your spouse is already up and you smell the coffee. On the one hand three pounds of grey substance, something we can hold in our hand and publically probe from the outside, weigh, map and measure, on the other hand something we can’t publically probe from the outside the phenomenon of your subjective experience - the way the sun looks, how it feels on your cheeks, the sound of the birds and the smell of the coffee. The major question for both philosophers and scientists is how those two things go together. How can three pounds of matter produce not merely the objective phenomenon of electro-chemical impulses across synapses but also the subjective phenomena of sights, and feels and sounds, and smells? It sounds like we perform a little bit of Aladdin’s magic every waking moment. We produce a subjective genie from an objective lamp. The question is, how that magic happens.”

• Despite major advances in understanding how the brain functions and new innovative ways of measuring brain activity, the question of how three pounds of grey matter can produce the complex phenomena mentioned above remains elusive.

• And we haven’t even begun to address the brains capacity to produce emotions, its ability to reason, to communicate, and its creative capacity.

• The problem facing neuroscientists is, they can explain the easy part, and that is, how much of the physical brain functions, the hard part is discovering how these functions are transformed into conscious or subjective experience.