The reasons that people believe in Adam and Eve are irrelevant to my point. As I said, I could make up any similar belief that someone could theoretically hold, and then come up with a GAE like scenario to make it seem compatible with science. That supports neither the religious belief nor the science. It’s just a trick to try make people comfortable with science. I don’t think it’ll work because I don’t think most creationists care whether their religion contradicts science. They just accept that (in their mind) science is wrong.
1 Like
Then you’re not comparing apples to apples. Why don’t you come up with a hypothesis which is more similar to the GAE, involving something in the distant past?
Last Thursdayism is not the same as GAE. If you think that’s the case, then you don’t understand the significance of the GAE, and what it entails.
How is it even “inadvertently deceptive”? Explain.
I think you haven’t shown that you can come up with a belief like the GAE. Your hypothesis is not quite like it.
1 Like
Also, you misunderstand. My point is that the GAE, even if it preserves Adam and Eve, necessitates revisiting many age-old Christian beliefs about Scripture and humanity. This is why GAE hasn’t been instantly universally accepted among Christians - there’s much thought and discussion that needs to be done about its theological implications. There are all sorts of constraints that a hypothesis like the GAE has to satisfy before it would win acceptance among theologians and religious people. You seem to be utterly unaware of these constraints, such that you think coming up with the GAE is trivial.
Yes @Faizal_Ali, please do explain how it is inadvertently deceptive.
What would that demonstrate? I’ve already done something more difficult.
Maybe I don’t. So why not explain what I’m missing?
You don’t think my hypothesis, if true, would cause people to re-evaluate what they believed about God and Christianity? I strongly disagree.
It leads people to believe that science has proven the existence of Adam and Eve. I know that is not your intention (hence the inadvertence). But just watch. That is how it will be received by many of those Christians who willnot reject it outright.
1 Like
No, what you’ve done is quite easy, in fact. You just made a hypothesis out of thin air with no theological nor scientific motivation.
A very large topic, which is out of the scope of this thread. We have discussed this multiple times on this website. I’ll start, though:
- The GAE doesn’t require us to reinterpret any scientific evidence we already have.
- The GAE contains just one miraculous proposition: that at one point in time in history, God intervened and created A&E de novo.
- The GAE accomplishes all of the above and yet arguably is still consistent with a relatively “traditional” reading of Genesis 1-11.
Yes, it would, but there’s no evidence that these would be consistent with orthodox Christian theology, unlike the GAE, where Josh has gone to great lengths to argue that it is consistent.
2 Likes
Neither does mine.
This is false. GAE also requires that a god created a special “garden” in which a supernaturally created pair of organisms could have a special sort or relationship with him. It also requires that this god also have intervened untold numbers of times, in ways that AFAIK are not specified or even acknowledged, in order to ensure that geneological Adam became a common ancestor to all humans. This is a major gap in GAE.
Whereas my hypothesis requires only a single type of intervention by the creator being, albeit one that occurs repeatedly.
And I keep trying to explain that this is irrelevant. The underlying message of GAE is that one can hold whatever one belief one wishes so long as one is able to concoct some post hoc unfalsifiable unscientific claims to prop it up. If one insists on holding to an interpretation of Genesis in which the earth is 6000 years old and no human beings share common ancestry with other organisms, then GAE offers nothing. But this person can come up with his own version of GAE, such as Last Thursdayism, that is consistent with his belief, and the proponent of GAE will have no coherent response other than to argue against that particular interpretation of Genesis. Which just gets us back to where we were before GAE. So nothing is accomplished.
2 Likes
@Philosurfer, what is your thoughts on this?
Not true. I want to know the arguments against the GAE. He is showing us the best that is out there, and it is quite weak. Let him continue, as it is making our case for us.
You misunderstand. I am not making an argument against GAE. I think GAE is wonderful, so much so that I made my own version of it. I think multitudes of GAE-type hypotheses should abound, for each and every conceivable theological position and worldview, so everyone will accept some form of evolution and everyone will agree with each other and peace will reign o’er earth. Or something like that. Sorry, I seem to have forgotten exactly what GAE was supposed to accomplish.
You are attempting to make a reductio ad absurdum, aren’t you? The problem, however, is that your hypothesis does not mirror GAE, not even superficially. It reduces to the absurd, but the GAE does not.
1 Like
Now I am sad. You called my hypothesis “absurd” and that is very mean. Exactly what do you find “absurd” about it?
Is this because the GAE has a historical basis?
Going back to your hypothesis: You said that 18% of humans at any given time are created de novo (DNC). Given that there are roughly 360k births/day, we would expect ~65,000 people to pop out of nowhere everyday to maintain this 18%. Now surely, if such a thing is actually happening, where are these human beings? Can we interview them? Are they de novo created with false memories?
In order for your hypothesis to hold, we would have to reinterpret some basic facts about reality - such as that our memories are no longer reliable. My work colleagues might not be real, but one of the 18% of people who were de novo created and then whose memory was implanted into my brain. Wait, maybe I’m one of the 18%?
The GAE, in contrast, requires none of these mental gymnastics.
The GAE doesn’t require the garden be supernaturally created. It could be refurbishment from an existing one, since the text simply says that “God planted a garden” (Gen. 2:8), which isn’t that different from God’s work in creating the rest of the universe in Gen. 1.
Where did you get this notion of many interventions in order to become a common ancestor? Have you read Josh’s articles? It seems to me you have not understood what genealogical ancestry entails. One way to start would be to read this article: https://asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2018/PSCF3-18Swamidass.pdf
As I outlined above, in order to line up with what we know, your hypothesis requires not just de novo creation but also implantation of false memories in the entire human population.
On the contrary, the proponent of the GAE will have a response, similar to the responses that we have made in this thread against your hypothesis, in that a hypothesis with too many ad hoc propositions gives awkward consequences about reality. This could be why, for example, the omphalos hypothesis has not gained a lot of traction and creationists prefer arguing against the scientific evidence instead of affirming that God is deceptive and created the world with the appearance of age.
Again, I think your confusion is due to your belief that religious people have no constraints whatsoever in their theology and philosophy, so they would readily believe Last Thursdayism. Perhaps you haven’t interacted with religious people other than in the context of aggressive debates about evolution?
2 Likes
His confusion also seems to be, at least in part, willful. It also seems studiously unaware of what has been published on the GAE so far.
1 Like
You are misrepresenting my hypothesis. As I have clearly explained: These de novo people are created in the forms of embryos or blastocysts and implanted into the uterus of the woman they will know as their mother. No one, including themselves, would ever know they had been created “de novo”.
I hope that clears up your misunderstanding.
And my hypothesis requires no garden at all.
I’m afraid it is you who are misunderstanding. Once Adam and Eve left the garden and joined the rest of the human species, to mingle their geneological descendants with the rest of the population, there is no guarantee that their lineage would not eventually die out. In fact, thru human history as a whole, the odds are against any particular male having any descendants at all:
https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/the-missing-men-in-your-family-tree/
So while it is not improbable that, just by chance, Adam would have ended up being an ancestor to all human beings alive, the odds are that he would not have. If God intended for this to happen (which I believe is one of the tenets of GAE) he would have had to intervene many times in the course of human history until a point was reached when every single human could trace their lineage back to Adam.
Anything else you need cleared up? Are you quite done trying to poke holes in my hypothesis, and are you finally ready to just accept it?
And I have shown that what you claim to be “awkward consequences” are the result of your misunderstanding of my hypothesis. Ironically enough, at the same time as you are accusing me of misunderstanding GAE only to have me correct your mistaken claims about it.
We are not talking about religious people as a whole, but creationists. Is that not the primary target of GAE? And I still fail to see how GAE is supposed to reach them. How is it supposed to ease the concerns of someone whose theology requires that the universe be 6000 years old, for instance?
I keep asking for people to correct what I am allegedly misunderstanding. No one comes up with anything, and I have even had to correct their misunderstandings about GAE (see above) as well as about my own hypothesis.
So I ask yet again: What am I misunderstanding about GAE?
1 Like