What a surprise… an atheist says that “reasons for one taking a religious position” should have no bearing on the truth of the religious position! So… you reject religion because you don’t accept reasons as evidence.
And theists accept religious positions as true because they think their reasons are relevant.
BUZZZZZZ! Ooops… too late, @Faizal_Ali, you have rejected the heart of religion for the 298th time … and have said, to paraphrase, without the heart of the religion, religion makes no sense to you.
You are perfectly consistent … for an Atheist. And so you will be receiving a consolation cash prize … which can only be collected if you take a taxi right now, and head to some other website.
And my point is that " grounding in any existing theological or philosophical framework" is irrelevant to the truth of a statement if there are other frameworks in which it could be true.
I base my understanding of your claims on your own writings here on this blog, such as the following:
Entirely consistent with the genetic evidence, it is possible Adam was created out of dust, and Eve out of his rib, less than 10,000 years ago in a divinely created garden where God might dwell with them, the first beings with opportunity to be in a relationship with Him. Perhaps their fall brought accountability for sin to all their descendants. Leaving the Garden, their offspring blended with their neighbors1 in the surrounding towns. In this way, they became genealogical ancestors of all those in recorded history. Adam and Eve, here, are the single-couple progenitors2 of all mankind. Even if this scenario is false or unnecessary, nothing in evolutionary science unsettles this story. So, evolution presses in a very limited way on our understanding of Adam and Eve, only suggesting (alongside Scripture) that their lineage was not pure.
Is that account no longer an accurate representation of your ideas? If so, then you need to add a disclaimer.
If not, then please point out what, if anything, I have written here that indicates misunderstanding of your claims.
Of course, if you assume your hypothesis is true, your hypothesis is the correct one. That’s not an interesting point at all: that’s just the basic rule of logic that if P, then P. It is a trivial point.
Rather, the point is that if we only assume what we know is true from science plus some basic propositions that most humans agree are true (e.g. rules of logic, that external reality exists, etc.), the GAE has less additional non-scientific propositions than your hypothesis. This makes your hypothesis less desirable than the GAE.
Can you explain what you mean? For almost any proposition S, there are many philosophical frameworks in which S is true.
Only if you hold to the assumption that the claim 18% of the human population has no human ancestors is false. If you do not hold to that position, then my hypothesis is able to explain scenarios that GAE is not. It does not matter how many non-scientific propositions my hypothesis includes if we need to account for a reality in which 18% of the human population has no human ancestors. My hypothesis accounts for that, GAE does not.
Of course we don’t hold to that assumption. There’s no reason to.
Which scenarios are you referring to?
It does mean something, because some philosophical frameworks are considered more desirable for other, independent reasons. The Christian framework is one such example. This is why Josh has found a publisher willing to publish a book on GAE. In contrast, you have not articulated a coherent, desirable framework in which your hypothesis is true.
Oh, I do not doubt for a moment that there is money to be made by pandering to the religious. Sorry if I gave the impression that I do.
(And, to be clear, I do not deny the sincerity of @swamidass’s intentions nor the nobility of his goals. My position is simply that whether there is a financially remunerative market for a particular idea is not a good indicator of its value or truthfulness.)
Joshua has made it clear that even scenarios with very limited assumptions regarding migration can show all humanity can become descendants of Adam/Eve offspring within 2 or 3 thousand years.
In other words, if Adam/Eve had been miraculously created … and then expelled into the general population of humanity, by the time of the birth of Jesus, all humanity could easily be 100% descended from Adam/Eve (and from several other early mated pairs).
It’s a belief someone could hold. And, for those people, I have provided a hypothesis that is consistent with their belief and which is not contradicted by science.
So what is the point of you offering this hypothesis? So far, we have shown that
Naturalists will not accept it as true
Naturalists regard it as an even more implausible hypothesis than GAE
Religious people will not accept it as true
Is there a point to a hypothesis that is rejected by everyone? Are you simply trolling?
Sure, being rejected by everyone “doesn’t have any bearing on its truthfulness”, but it does have a bearing on whether it’s worth discussing.
The point is to demonstrate how trivially easy it is to come up with something like GAE that would support literally any random and ridiculous belief someone might happen to hold. There is nothing particular about the story of Adam and Eve that allows one to do so.
Maybe Joshua is right and this will be some major breakthrough that allows more fundamentalist Christians to accept science. I wouldn’t bet on it, but who knows?
I still don’t agree with using poor arguments to deceive someone into accepting something, and that’s what I believe GAE is. That everyone here seems to think my hypothesis is silly and pointless, when the main difference between it and GAE is merely that mine does not address a belief anyone actually holds, illustrates my point.
Your hypothesis is not like the GAE, as I and others have repeatedly showed in this thread. It has way more ad hoc propositions, which is bad, even if they’re both unfalsifiable. It’s quite funny how I’ve said this point a few times already and you’ve refused to acknowledge it.
It’s not trivially easy to come up with the GAE idea. If that is the case then why have few other scholars thought of it? Why both tons of scientists and theologians miss it?
Finally, you also seem to be oblivious to all the sorts of theological discussions which have centered around GAE. It’s not simply “well, it’s not ruled out by science, so let’s propose it!” It takes a lot of thought to think of how GAE fits with the textual and theological evidence. Some atheists might think that religious people are crazy and will believe anything put in front of them, but that’s just not true.
That’s quite an accusation. What is the deception here, and who is being deceived?
That’s simply because my hypothesis addresses a more detailed and specific belief, that involves things that are happening on an ongoing basis in the present. It’s easier to come up with something that involves a singular event in the distant past.
That’s not true. People have been using examples like Last Thursdayism for a long time. No one had that gumption to try present it as a serious argument, though. I guess that is Joshua’s dubious achievement.