Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!mips!dimacs.rutgers.edu!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: The moment of creation of life Message-ID: Date: 17 Sep 90 07:16:22 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 34 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Frank Farkas writes: ---------------------------------------- Now, if one doesn't believe in the pre-existence, than they have a couple of interesting questions which they need to answer. Since God the Father is the Father of our spirit, when did he created us? At the moment of conception, at the time of the quickening or at the moment of birth? Since there is no biblical answer to these questions it doesn't mean that God the Father has not created our spirit. The question is, when. There is nothing in the Bible which rules out pre-existence. ---------------------------------------- In Genesis 2.7 we read ``Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.'' One of the problems I have with ``pre-existence of the spirit'' is that I think a person is a whole being. The creation discussed above is a two-part process: the making of the physical body followed by God's breathing life into it. After that, we can talk about a living being, not before. A person is a physical and spiritual being, with roots in each realm. The personality, the thing that makes us uniquely ourselves, is a spiritual phenomenon, but it is not meaningful to talk about a personality with no way of manifesting itself, and the physical realm appears, at least from the above passage, to be God's chosen environment for our personalities to manifest themselves. -- Fred Gilham gilham@csl.sri.com ``Man was meant to lead with his chin. He is only worth knowing with his guard down, his head up, and his heart rampant on his sleeve.'' -- Robert Farrar Capon