Did God Consider Neandertals Human?

[FortunaMaximus]

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A good neandertal should go to heaven. Is it fair, that he is an neandertal in heaven for all of eternity?

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As opposed to "part" of eternity?

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Well, part of eternity is still... eternity. I'll raise you half an infinity. [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img]

[madnak]

Isn't a finity part of infinity?

[FortunaMaximus]

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Isn't a finity part of infinity?

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It's a subset. But, yeah.

[Shadowrun]

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Just curious.

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Jews would say no, the first people considered 'humans'= adam and eve

as far as their status, it would be the same as any other animal that isnt considered human

[vhawk01]

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And the more interesting question than all of this neanderthal stuff is whether a future human clone would have a soul or not.

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When I was a kid the first test tube baby was concieved and born. I remember the question being posed as to wether or not she had a soul.

Stu

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Actually, its a really interesting discussion, because basically before the morula stage, when the embryo is like 8 cells, we could basically take each of those cells and grow an identical twin, and we could even then take the 8 cells from each of those and make 8 new identical twins, ad nauseum. So, if the embryo is a baby at fertilization...how many souls does it have? Do the souls get recreated each time we seperate these cells? Where does the soul live, in the nucleus with the germline DNA?

I suppose the quick and easy answer is the 8-cell embryo has as many souls as its gonna need because God already knows how many twins we are gonna decide to make from it. Not very satisfying, personally, but I guess omniscience ruins the fun yet again.

[Stu Pidasso]

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I suppose the quick and easy answer is the 8-cell embryo has as many souls as its gonna need because God already knows how many twins we are gonna decide to make from it. Not very satisfying, personally, but I guess omniscience ruins the fun yet again.

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A simpler answer is that a single soul can be divided as long as a single embryo is divisable.

Stu

[Bill Haywood]

This was addressed on the PBS Evolution series that I was just watching with my kids.

The filmakers visited Wheaton evangelical college which was going through a controversy over evolution. Although evangelical, Wheaton is open to discussing evolution, and many of the students were suffering because their learning pushed them towards evolution, but they were worried it would threaten their faith.

So they had this guest speaker who was a hardcore evangelical Christian, but also a scientist who believed in evolution. A student asked him about one of the stumpers that evangelicals face when they entertain evolution. Since only man, not animals, has a soul, when/how did hominids receive a soul, seeing as they evolved from unsouled lesser animals.

The speaker answered like a scientist. He did not know, since he lacked evidence, but one possibility he suggested was that evolution progressed for a long time before any critter received a soul. Eventually, rather recently in evolutionary terms, God chose a hominid to enter a special relationship with him and receive souls. So extrapolating this theory to the Neandertal question, we just don't know precisely when hominids received souls, so Neandertal may or may not have had one.

So if you believe in evolution, the answer is no one knows if Neandertal was saved.

But if you are a creationist, it isn't an issue because Neandertals died out tens of thousands of years before the Earth was created, so they never really existed, hence it is a trick question asked by smart asses in sunday school, kind of like the question about whether God is powerful enough to create a rock so huge that even he couldn't move it. And we'll be talking to David's mother about inappropriate behavior in Sunday school class.

[cpk]

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Just curious.

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What does "human" mean?

[JCCARL]

Rephrase question please. Many neanderthals walk the world today. Not sure they became extinct, they just went on to work for governrment.