EthanW's take on the GAE

According to Genesis he could eat fruit while in Eden, but had to till the ground to grow “herbs of the field” after he was exiled.

That makes him a farmer, but it doesn’t make him the first.

It does if there wasn’t anyone else around at the time. Obviously this doesn’t work within the GAE framework.

That was my point. The idea of Adam as first farmer has biblical support only if we further suppose that he’s the first man. GAE deprives that idea of biblical support. So why maintain it?

[nitpick mode]
I don’t think GAE does deprive that idea of Biblical support - I think GAE requires the Bible to be reinterpreted, but the support remains if the original interpretation is retained.
[/nitpick mode]

I don’t think I’m expressing this clearly :frowning_face:

Agreed. Perhaps you could quote the support for Adam as first farmer that you think is independent of his being first man. That is, if Adam is the first man, any quote that says he is a farmer also means he’s the first farmer. But if he’s not the first man, those statements no longer qualify. You would need something about “first”, explicitly.

Can’t - I don’t know of any. AFAICT the bible says Adam is the first man, and had to become a farmer before there were other men. Him being the first farmer (or maybe second :smile:) is implicit.

And that’s incompatible with GAE, right? Once you accept GAE, all that necessarily goes away.

The Bible also implies there were others (outside the garden?) that AE’s children intermarried with. We are discussing possibilities and interpretations, I don’t see that we can lock into any single interpretation without becoming “Literalists”.

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Maybe - it’d depend on the level of additional capability given to A/E by the G changes. I haven’t read the book.

Can we go back to discussing alignment? I have read the books on that, and have even experimented with variations on the underlying nature of it.

John, I believe you are investing too much into the term “first farmer”.

Depending upon the audience’s presuppositions, Adam may have been inadequate as a farmer, or a genius farmer, or anywhere in between.

Did he master irrigation? We don’t know.
Did he master cross-fertilization? We don’t know.
Did he master plowing? We don’t know.

The imagination of the YECs, to whom GAE is directed, is - - by all accounts - - almost limitless. There is no point in trying to confine how a YEC might define “gardener”, “agriculturalist”, “farmer” or any other related term.

This is logically incorrect. How do you even begin to defend this statement:

“Adam is the first farmer, only if he is the first human”.

This kind of logic certainly doesn’t work anywhere else either: See Genesis 4:20 - “…Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle.”

Jabal was the first to dwell in tents, raising cattle, and yet we also know Jabal came after Adah.

Being the first of a certain craft or skill doesn’t seem to have anything to do with being the first man or human.

@EthanW,

It does you credit to thoughtfully consider the various scenarios. Indeed, this is what GAE is supposed to allow.

“Would the actions of a few farming families of an unspecified location necessarily be discovered by archaeologists?” My response: no, of course not.

Just imagine all the possible iterations of this very idea!

[a] Perhaps it would be Adam’s grandchildren, or great, great, great grandchildren who really put farming on the map?

[b] Perhaps as good as Adam is, he farms completely by hand and shovel, and it would be one of Adam’s lineage who first uses a plow?

[c] Perhaps Adam’s kin, visiting another village, comes to master the use of water wheels and canals?

The different possibilities are endless… and each one is susceptible to the same problem: when do these practices become noticeable to archaeology?

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@Roy

“Alignment” of what to what?

Alignment of (semi-)intelligent races.

The latest common genealogical ancestor of all humanity (after recontact with the Tasmanians) is estimated to have lived remarkably recently, so for a bare Genealogical Adam and Eve (an arbitrarily designated couple in the ancestry of the latest common genealogical ancestor) the problems are more ethical/theological than scientific. But the more properties you ascribe to the GAE the more the problems multiply.

The question is what distinguishes (in Catholic parlance) “true humans” (the descendants of Adam and Eve) from other humans. If it’s possession of a soul (and you’re a traducian) then you can just say that’s the way that souls are inherited - it’s not a subject that science has anything to say on.

But say that possession of language is the distinguishing mark, and you have to address the question as to what allows Adam and his descendants (and no-one else) to possess language. If you postulate that there was no physical difference and language is a learned ability you have to explain how all Adam’s descendants learned it, and no-one else did. If you postulate that there is a physical difference, you have to explain what it is/how it is transmitted. The obvious candidate would be a genetic difference, which turns your genealogical Adam into a genetic Adam. I’m skeptical of the hypothesis that a mutation in FoxP2 (the obvious candidate) is sufficient to account for the language differences between chimpanzees and humans, but if it was you have the problem of how it gets transmitted to all of Adam’s descendants. It gets worse if you postulate a suite of mutations, because then you have to deal with recombination as well as segregation. Furthermore, Neandertals share the derived human alleles in FoxP2, which puts your genetic Adam at least 500,000 years back. (Maybe more - someone might have made an estimate from how suppressed genetic variation is in the vicinity of that gene.)

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@Roy

Can you produce an “alignment discussion” from the viewpoint of a Trinitarian Christian?

I think we have a true dilemma here:

If you personally cannot produce a Trinitarian discussion, then you are probably attempting some sort of Atheistic alignment discussion. And so it would have no bearing on the GAE scenarios as proposed.

If you are able to imagine a Trinitarian discussion, the view expressed in such a discussion has almost certainly been found invalid and consistently dismissed by main-stream Trinitarians for generations.

It’s not the term that matters. You are persistently failing to engage the question. Is there anything in Genesis that can support the claim that Adam was the first person to do anything you care to name connected with agriculture, by whatever name or whatever it is?

I wouldn’t try, since that is not my claim. You seem to have difficulty in reading what I actually say. I’m saying that there is biblical support for him being the first farmer only if that’s entailed by him being the first human. The absence of support is not the same as contradiction. (There are extra-biblical reasons why nobody, ever, could possibly be considered “the first farmer”, but that’s not what we’re talking about now.)

So, for at least the third time: what support can you find in Genesis for Adam being the first farmer?

In the USA, Melania Trump is First Lady. But there were other ladies before her.

There are different meanings for “first”, and I think @gbrooks9 is suggesting a different meaning from the one that you are using.

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I don’t think he is, and I think the meaning of “First Lady” is entirely irrelevant to this discussion. In the current context, “first” clearly means that nobody was doing that thing, whatever it may be, previously.