I meant that they are part of life not the reason or purpose of it. I made other points there too that you missed; how do we define the earth as anything other than what it is now. If it is changed beyond recognition they it is no longer the earth. Same as if you were changed beyond recognition, you wouldn’t be you.
I am not, I am just making the philosophical point, that if you change something then it is no longer what it formerly was. ‘Water into wine’ here means that god would have to change things illogically;
Change the rules of the universe such that the earth can be grown impossibly large to cope with ever greater binary exponents of population expansion [which goes into zillions and on into denumerable amounts].
Resurrection paradox; during a war an innocent farmer is killed, his body blown apart by cannon, a part of his arm flies off into a pigpen and get eaten by a pig. A priest later eats the pig.
When the priest and the farmer are later resurrected, who gets the former cells of their bodies? They were once the farmers arm, then become a constituent part of the priest, so rightly are part of both.
Okay. But you are a body too. Or at least you have a body, and some might think this is an important, wonderful thing a deep part of our human identity.
For me it is dust, the only thing about it that is human is mind and information. My identity is formed from evolutional and environmental informations, then when I am born I take that info on and it becomes part of me. As I grow into myself that info is subsumed by who I am I.e. my soul or that of it which is incarnated in this form.
In short what I am saying is that being human is all about human ‘being’.
Well there is part of the indo-European spiritual culture which relates to that, in celtic lore there was a belief that we are all children of ‘dis’ ~ grown out of the earth, and I think there are similar things in most ancient religions.
He may be correct, that in some animist way the earth itself contains life, and then it would be true that our spirit and souls are literally within the earth. I’d have to believe in the biblical creation to see adam as the living form of all that though. creation theories often think of us as arising from some creation mound, but now we have to take that back nearly 15 billion years to before there were planets even ~ for it to be correct that is!
Ancient peoples didn’t have the same way of seeing things as us, the element of earth wouldn’t have simply referred to matter, chemicals, mud, it would have been a spiritual thing.
interesting!
Problem is that this idea is transcended when we consider the original being of the priest, his resurrection would necessarily include the farmers arm, as would the farmers. If however in the resurrection we all get new bodies in the form of the one we left this world with ~ a replica, then your position holds.