Yes, and of course, I point to Paul’s teaching and the monogenesis tradition too. I do mention Acts 17:26 too, but is important that it only mentions “Nations” (a political term) not anything resembling “biological humans to the beginning of time.” Of course AD 1 is just rough, and in context perhaps 30 AD is better.
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Actually this is not a problem for several reasons. Aside from the fact that we would never know, this is not a problem if we have a good account of their human dignity and worth. It also does not contradict monogenesis, which is not articulated with scientific precision.
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No I haven’t forgotten that. My point is that it’s not clear if you now think it reads that way, or if you think it doesn’t read that way, since you said “My PSCF article is correct that it “appears our ancestors” never dip to a single couple”. So do you think it was really strong and needs correction, or isn’t really strong so it doesn’t need correction?
Does mainstream science say it isn’t true?
So does mainstream science think there’s strong evidence it’s true?
So the purpose of the article was not to reconcile interpretations of the challenge of scientific conclusions on genetic ancestry? Your abstract seems to say the opposite.
Do we all descend from a single couple? Most are convinced that the genetic and archeological sciences answer with an unequivocal “no.” It appears that our ancestors share common ancestors with the great apes and arise as a large population, never dipping in size to a single couple. Without contradicting the findings of genetic science, genealogical science gives a different answer to the question.
That looks pretty clear to me, and you’ve been selling GAE as a solution to this problem.
My issue is that first you said the article was incorrect, and you’ve been meaning to say this publicly for some time, and then you turned around and said the article is correct, and doesn’t need changing. You’ve said you’ve “already apologized for the errors”, and then turned around and given the impression there are no errors. Which is it?
I think the scientific evidence is that 500,000 years ago there were no humans with language, agriculture, and domestication, so you shouldn’t be representing this as an option. That’s being truthful about the scientific evidence. It’s clear that Anne’s concern with pushing Adam and Eve back to 500,000 years is theologically motivated by her cdesignproponentism, and her strong desire to have Adam and Eve as the genetic ancestors of all humans.
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The vast marjoity of scientists would disagree with you on language here, though language does not fossilize. I’m not sure we can tell for sure.
And most, including WLC and @Agauger, would agree with you on this. They doesn’t require agriculture or domestication because they take this part of the account as mythical. For this reason, I should represent it as an option.
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OK, so I think that is a reasonable argument. Yet, if one completely rejects the structuralist aspect of “human” and sticks to textual humans, one could still consistently argue that there could be some biological humans out there who are not DAE by AD 1 or 30, to which Acts 1:8 does not apply, and we are not called to spread the gospel to them, any more than we are called to spread the gospel to chimpanzees or orangutans or other non-humans. Am I right?
One way out of this is if the monogenesis tradition you refer to includes a biological/structural definition of human that bridges this gap with the DAE or “textual human”. Does it?
(I could also imagine a subtler way of refuting the above argument, by appealing to the fact that it seems God intended A&E to interbreed with all humans outside of the garden, which implies an endorsement of their worth and dignity, despite not being DAE. However, this wouldn’t be a direct Scriptural argument, but one based on our model.)
Right, but we would then have to derive their human dignity and worth from a structuralist or biological definition of human, not based from their being DAE, which they are not.
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Sort of.
We don’t have to reject a structuralist view. It can’t be one of our multivalent definitions. Depending on precisely how we mean it, it could arise form AE (see Kemp) or in the distant past before AE.
No, you’ve made some theological leaps here that I don’t think you can make. I’d say if they are subject to physical death, they need to the gospel. I make that case based on Adam’s original purpose.
It does not. Even if it did, this wouldn’t be a problem (see Kemp).
Exactly. That is what I make very directly in the new version of the book.
Once again, read the new book. Adam’s original purpose, and Gregor of Nyssa’s gift of freedom. Or even from the Image of God, or the dominion call (depending on Genesis 1 lines up).
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The vast majority of scientists would say that 500,000 years ago there were beings which we could call the ancestors of today’s humans, and who had some kind of communication which may have included certain vocalizations, but definitely not the articulated spoken language we see in Genesis. There’s not even agreement that Neanderthals had language, rather than just vocalizations.
But that’s the point, in order to make it fit they have to radically re-interpret the text, so you shouldn’t represent it as an option without serious qualifications. You could say “This option is ok if you’re happy with Adam and Eve living 500,000 years ago, but without the kind of spoken language we see in the text, and without the domestication we see in the text, and without the agriculture we see in the text, and by the way you also have a host of other problems to solve now, like fixing up the timeline, and figuring out where to put Noah, and how to justify yet another genetic bottleneck”.
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Yup, and that is entirely clear. Which is why most people are interested in GAE. Ironic isn’t it that you write this:
I’m not sure if you intend it this way, but that sure sounds dismissive. The reality is that I’ve just been trying to be honest with people about the evidence, and encouraged people to explore. If WLC goes down the ancient Adam path, great, I’ll help him make sense of the evidence. The reality is that the vast majority of people, it seems, are going to be drawn to the GAE. I don’t need to “sell” it, because it is the traditional account of Adam and Eve. It is the historical starting point.
There isn’t much to sell. All I’m doing is undoing the concordism of the last 150 years. Pair the eisegesis away, and you are left with the GAE.
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I think this is a neat argument that fits in perfectly with the model. Now, I think you have shown there are good answers (such as this) within your model for the concerns raised. One can definitely say that the GAE model can incorporate a host of traditional teachings such as inerrancy, monogenesis, de novo creation, and traditional understandings of the image of God. However, even if the conclusions are all traditional, I would say that some of the (theological) reasoning is pretty new and innovative, such as the above idea of de novo creation implying God’s intention to make A&E interbreed with those outside the garden. (I certainly haven’t heard that one before, but I could be wrong. It’s certainly a clever reversal of the usual deceptive God objection - why did God create Adam with appearance of age?)
Can one really claim it as a truly “traditional account”? I think it’s more accurate to say it’s a new, more comprehensive model which can subsume and incorporate the traditional account, similar to how general relativity subsumes Newtonian physics.
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Once again, I’ve adjusted the language. I present a speculative narratives that contains within it the traditional account. The narrative is innovative, but the traditional account is unmodified, vanilla, the same as it has been for 3000 years. So yes, it is the traditional account, with the mystery of those outside the garden expounded.
As for relativity subsuming Newtonian physics? I think it’s an apt analogy, but I suppose it is better if other people point it out. Otherwise I’m sure I’ll be accused of arrogance.
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How does it sound dismissive? I hold to a GAE model myself, just different to yours. I’ve held to this for years, long before I even heard of Biologos. As you know it has historical roots which go back very far.
But why would you do that if we don’t know if it’s even true? This is the point I made earlier. I’m interested in finding out what’s actually true, not in accepting one or two things which are true, then throwing them together into a mix of things which I’ve just made up, many of which may not be true at all. I want facts first, interpretation later, and I want the interpretation to be based on truth. I don’t want to hide behind “Well science can’t prove it isn’t true, at least not yet”, or “I can do what I like with the text, and my interpretations don’t need to be based on evidence”. And before you say it, yes I’m fully aware that other people see it differently and have no problem with such approaches.
I don’t see this at all. The three models you present all involve concordism and permit eisegesis. They explicitly let people do what they want with the text, to make it fit the science. You’ve even said one of the advantages of your approach is that it gives free reign to theology. That’s exactly why Anne can decide to interpret part of the text as saying X, while interpreting other parts as saying Y,and WLC can interpret parts as saying Y, while interpreting other parts as saying Z, and neither of them has to present any evidence that what they’re saying is true, they can just assume it’s true and everything is ok.
If we’re concerned about facts, then three conflicting interpretations of Adam and Eve can’t all be true at the same time, but if facts don’t matter then sure, they’re all options.
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This is the first time I’ve noticed this paragraph. My head does swim a little with that last sentence:
“Without contradicting the findings of genetic science [i.e., we share common ancestors with the great apes - - never dipping in size to a single couple]… genealogical science gives a different answer to the question.”
This is semantically flawed, yes? Genealogical science doesn’t give a different answer … it ASKS a different question – wouldn’t you say?
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That is not my role here. I have personal views, but I’m not here to promote them. I’m here to serve others in the Church with an honest account of the evidence. You are welcome to make the case for a GAE against WLC, and I’m sure I’ll be tangling with him about it too. However, I will never conscript “science” against him where the evidence is not against him.
Let’s have the debate about which makes more sense, but I insist we do so without using science as a club, falsely claiming other’s views are ruled out when they are not.
The GAE is explicitly a rejection of eisegesis. Of course someone could go down the eisegesis path with genealogical science, but I certainly do not. As for the others, I agree they are esiegeting on the definition of “human,” but science doesn’t tell them this is wrong. I will keep the theological case seperate from the scientific case.
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This is refined in my book too :). In just a few more months, we’ll all get to pick that a part too.
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Actually, I’m not sure that is true. As far as I know, I’m the first person to show there is no evidence against de novo creation of Adam and Eve. I think it is more likely there are some details you agree with, but you haven’t yet fully appreciated the full range of points that I have made.
Moreover, there is a difference between “holding a view” and successfully making the scientific case for said view. I also (unfortunately) successfully demonstrated it isn’t polygenesis, which took a lot of effort.
What I did was not easy.
@Jonathan_Burke (cc: @swamidass )
While I can’t affirm that there isn’t some version of “Geneal.Adam” that is concordist… I am 95% certain that there is at least one version of “Geneal.Adam” that is not concordist.
My conclusion of this is based on the question of “just what did the ancient readers of Genesis think was being said in the first chapters of Genesis?”
Naturally, we can assume that some people just took the “plain reading” of these chapters. But the ancient response to these chapters just couldn’t have been monolithically uniform. There are discontinuities between Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, where it seems certain that some readers would have felt these were intentional clues to an alternate interpretation of Genesis: it seems virtually certain that some ancient readers would have to have suspected that Genesis was talking about a pre-Adam population of humans … and that Adam and Eve were a special pair of humans hidden away in an Eden compound personally run by God.
And then this suspicion is confirmed in later sections that says Cain marries… but doesn’t even attempt to comment on who this wife would be … followed by the incredible notion that Cain and his son built a city … when there doesn’t seem to be any people to justify a city?
These are not modern “realizations” that need concordist interpretations. These problems were anciently apparent … and it is only now that we have found out how we can make sense of these ancient issues of interpretation.
This is different from the notorious problem of the Firmament texts: there was virtually no reason for ancient readers to suspect there was a problem with the firmament texts … and we see some stupendously silly interpretations to try to fit the language of the firmament into a modern interpretation of the those verses.
The question of the pre-Adamite humans and the Cain texts is exactly the opposite: some ancient readers knew there was a problem… and some may have simply arrived at the credible conclusions we see in at least one or two Genealogical Adam scenarios … not knowing anything more comprehensive than that.
@Jonathan_Burke, are you able to explain how Genealogical Adam’s agreement with such ancient interpretations makes Genealogical Adam “concordist”?
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It is worth pointing out that this isn’t true. Scripture has a recapitulatory and repetitive pattern to it, and this is particularly true of typological prophecies. The point is that actually more than one could be true at the same time. In fact I’m sure that if the GAE is true, then something like Denis L.'s mythological account is probably true too. Perhaps the GAE is a typological enactment of our deep past.
More than one could be true at the same time. what are your thoughts on this @jongarvey?
Whoah there… Sure, we all want to find what’s actually true!
But seeing the fulsome proliferation of hundreds and hundreds of denominations, to think that Joshua can both determine what is true and get a hundred different Evangelical leaderships to agree on it is rather preposterous.
GEA is a template for helping a rather specific subset of Creationists: I mean the set of Creationists that actually suffers over having to ignore and dismiss millions of years of natural evidence for what happened on Earth for millions of years. They suffer because they do not have the strength or the courage to “maim” their Christian faith by rejecting Romans 5.
Sure, there are other Creationists groups who really haven’t settled on Romans 5 as a “deal breaker”. But in my view, Romans 5 is the most difficult of all the Creationist deal breakers.
When I used to do jumping jacks and hand-stands trying to inspire revision in the Creationist inclination for Original Sin and The Fall… now I don’t react negatively to that issue at all. As long as they put Adam somewhere close to the scientifically plausible time frame (which I see as somewhere between 6000 to 8000 ya), I’m completely delighted and at peace.
Genealogical Adam doesn’t require Original Sin to be of value… but I do believe that Genealogical Adam derives its greatest value (greatest “bang for the buck”) by accommodating Original Sin!
KEY THOUGHT: It’s this ability to accommodate Original Sin that brings “Peace” to our template for how to fit Evolutionary history into our Christian faith.
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I can’t remember Venema interacting with David’s article back in 2010, and BioLogos adopted a policy of deleting the old conversations. He was remarkably slow to offer any theological opinion then, usually getting Darrel Falk to reply on his behalf. But he would certainly have been fully aware of it at the time, as the dicussion was brisk.
Today is Good Friday, and the mystery of the Cross in healing the Old Creation, presaged and interwoven into all manner of events and prophecies of the Old Testament; together with the glory of the Resurrection which inaugurates the New Creation interrupted by Adam’s sin, show the threadbare nature of a scientistic approach to the world.
These things are to do with meaning, and abstraction of scientific principles is specifically intended to bypass meaning (which is, after all, only another way of saying “final causation.”
Sadly even many bearing to name of Christ have not, in our days, prayed for insight into such mysteries, thinking instead that science will provide sufficient revelation. As if naturalistic methodology could ever explain the purposes of God, even in principle.
Good Friday is a day to remedy that, and that’s how I intend to spend the rest of it - at least until a bevy of infant relatives arrives this afternoon.
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Even if more than one can be true … it seems unlikely that all the scenarios are equally true (or even equally likely!).
I got this kind of objection from BioLogos many times…
And yet, really, BioLogos folks are not really doing anything differently than we are.
They wanted Creationists to be more figurative in interpreting Genesis. But if one Creationists preferred one Figurative interpretation … no one seemed to object or even care if another brand of Creationist arrived and wrote vigorously in preference to a different figurative approach.
At the core of it, BioLogos simply wanted a literal interpretation to be abandoned… they weren’t interested in how you shaped your figurative “spin” to match one’s metaphysics or theology.
Here at Peaceful Science … why would we care which Genealogical Adam scenario a Creationist felt most in sync with ? … if at the end of the day, the Creationist is satisfied that he has a de novo Adam and Eve to embrace … and no longer has to dump millions of years of Evolutionary evidence to do it!!!
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