To me that requires actually finding out what’s true. So I don’t see why you think your role us not to find out what’s true.
No one is suggesting you do this.
You don’t, but you’re entirely willing for others to do so. You actually encourage them to do it.
Basic morality should tell them this is wrong.
I don’t believe theology gives us a blank cheque to make up whatever we want, and claim it’s true.
But I wasn’t talking about GAE, I was talking about the page on which you presented three different interpretations, and represented them as all equally valid, actively encouraging people to just pick the one they liked, even though they can’t all be true, and even though none of them were arrived at through science. They’re ad hoc harmonizations.
How much reading of the historical theology on this subject have you done? People have known for a long time there’s no evidence against de novo creation of Adam and Eve, as long as they’re not understood as the genetic progenitors of all humans. This is one of the first alternative views I encountered even when I still rejected evolution, and that was nearly 20 years ago. Sometimes looking at what American Christians are doing is really like looking back in time. This is one of those moments.
If you haven’t already done it, I would strongly suggest you look into historical views which are virtually the same as yours, and incorporate them into your marketing. It might help some people to know that you weren’t the first person to make a suggestion like this.
The core genealogical fact on which you’re making a case, has been known for a very long time. It was discussed in the nineteenth century. Terms such as “natural heirship” were used, and although they didn’t talk about DNA, they talked about “blood”. Henry Kendall, a Presbyterian, made much of this.
Try these for example.
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Henry Kendall, “Natural Heirship: Or, All the World Akin,” Popular Science Monthly 28.19 (1886).
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Henry Kendall, The Kinship of Men an Argument from Pedigrees; or, Genealogy Viewed as a Science. (Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1888).
But you haven’t made a scientific case for GAE. It’s a matter of faith. In my view at least GAE has explicit textual support, insofar as it is well known that Cain’s fear of other people, and Cain’s wife, indicate that there were already other humans on the earth at the time of Adam and Eve. So it has Scriptural support, which is what moved me to this position years ago, but there’s no actual scientific evidence that Adam and Eve were created de novo.
What you did was write an accessible explanation of something which other people had already thought of.
But you’re changing the subject. I’m talking about the law of non-contradiction. If on the other hand you really want to argue that everyone can have their own truth, and that something can be P and not-P simultaneously, then why even bother with science, you can just make everything up as you go along.
By the way, your GAE page (written before your PSCF article was published), has some statements in it which you seem to be backing away from now, like this.
Genetic science still stands. It still appears that most our ancestors arise as a population, not a single couple, and we share ancestry with the great apes. This is not an argument against evolutionary science in any way. Evolution is a valid description of the history of those “outside the garden.” They appear to have evolved from a common ancestor with the great apes.
I’m not sure if you still want to stand by that.