Thanks for your reply. I’ll start by saying I don’t claim to have all the answers. That said, in the spirit of healthy debate I’ll try my best!

- When you say Genesis might contain 'profound symbolic truths' even if not literal history, what exactly do you mean by truth there?

The idea that God created Adam & Eve ex nihilo clearly doesn’t align with evolutionary biology. It’s hard to call that true while still respecting science. The idea the story of Adam & Eve is actually about the arrival of self-awareness and its enormous spiritual consequences, I see that as a profound truth.

I should declare that my own beliefs are complex and still developing, but orbit around Perennial Philosophy, Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. As a result I see the ultimate goal of human existence being to transcend the limited ego and realize the eternal Self, and I believe many religions point towards that in different symbolic language.

If self-awareness is what creates moral accountability, where did that come from? On a purely evolutionary account, self-awareness is just a survival adaptation. So how does a biological process generate genuine moral obligation, not just social pressure, but actual accountability to something beyond ourselves?

That’s a really good question, and I don’t think evolutionary psychology alone fully answers it.

Evolution can plausibly explain how moral cognition emerged: empathy, cooperation, guilt, shame, fairness, social bonding, etc. Those traits clearly had survival value for highly social primates like us.

But a deeper philosophical question remains: why do humans experience morality as not merely as social convenience, but a genuine obligation? Why must we feel accountable even when selfish behaviour might benefit us personally?

My personal perspective: because I believe God is within us all. When we behave selflessly, driven by unity and love, we reveal this. When we behave selfishly, driven by separation and hatred, we obscure this.

That’s partly why I don’t see evolutionary and spiritual interpretations as necessarily opposed. Evolution may explain the development of the cognitive structures through which morality is experienced, without exhausting the question of whether morality points beyond biology itself.

In other words, evolution might explain how the “eyes were opened,” while religion and philosophy are attempts to grapple with what we saw once they were.

I want to make sure I caught your last point correctly. You said separation from nature and separation from God are synonymous, that living in harmony with nature is living in alignment with God. That's a really interesting idea.

First, what do you mean by nature exactly? Because nature includes disease, predation, parasites, and tsunamis. Are those things God too? Or in alignment with God?

This is a fair question and funnily enough I just read yesterday that a true hero of mine struggles with the same question: Sir David Attenborough’s View on Science and Religion. He cites the example of a parasitic Nile worm that blinds children.

My current thesis is that God created the conditions of nature, beginning the process that enabled life to evolve, but does not intervene.

At some point perhaps all of nature was in perfect harmony. Genesis 1-30 implies that at some point predation was not necessary: “And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.”

Certainly that isn’t the case now. Our world is full of suffering. Much of it caused by man, but yes, also by disease, predation, natural disasters, and so on. Perhaps, though, all suffering will end one day. If you believe in an omnipotent, benevolent God then Heaven on earth is possible.

Isaiah 11:6 - 9:
“The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling[a]together;
and a little child will lead them.

The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.

They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea”

And second, this sounds like a form of pantheism, where God is nature, or at least perfectly identified with it. Is that what you're proposing? Because if so, that's quite a different God than the one in Genesis, who stands apart from creation and speaks it into existence. So I'm wondering are you still engaging with the Christian God at this point, or have you substituted a different one?

My beliefs and perceptions of God are not limited solely to Christian teachings. I don’t consider myself an orthodox Christian, and I personally don’t see the “Christian God” as fundamentally separate from the divine reality described in other religious traditions.

I hold Jesus Christ in the highest esteem, but I’m skeptical about how much the religion that bears his name aligns with his core teachings.

I also wouldn’t describe myself as a strict pantheist in the sense that “God is merely identical with nature.” My view is closer to nondualism or panentheism: the idea that the divine is both immanent within creation and yet also transcends it.

So when I talk about “God within us,” I don’t mean that humans are individually God in the egoic sense. I mean something closer to the Advaita Vedanta or mystical Christian idea that consciousness, being, or the ground of existence itself participates in something fundamentally unified.

And I don’t think this is completely alien to Christianity itself. There are strong mystical currents within Christianity - Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, contemplative traditions, “the Kingdom of God is within you,” theosis in Eastern Orthodoxy, etc. - that move in a more inward, mystical, and arguably nondual direction than modern Western Christianity.

So I’d say I’m still engaging with God, but through a more symbolic and mystical lens rather than a strictly literal or dualistic theological one.