Whatever you do, be careful never to attract him here.
To that end, I have deleted his name from the post above, in the hopes that he will not stumble into this space via Googling himself.
Actually he’s managed to already get himself banned from PS, along with his sock puppet Sharon Mahoney the female retired marine biologist. 
One reason those guys like Amazon so much is that it’s almost impossible to get banned there any longer. One creationist who spammed my threads some time ago posted over, and over, and over again, about how those who disagreed with him had never had the pleasure of various erotic delights, which he described himself as being masterful at – and it is fair to say that his statements were sufficiently graphic to get most people to want to make sure the kids aren’t reading over their shoulders! What the relevance of any of that was, I really don’t know – but there was a time when Amazon would ban a user like that.
Now, at Amazon, it’s really strange and arbitrary. They still ban people, but quite capriciously. One person will be posting highly offensive matter in a thread, another will say something mildly sarcastic, and the mildly-sarcastic poster will get an instant death sentence from Amazon: deletion of the trailing year’s posts. It hasn’t happened to me, but I’ve known three people it has happened to, and only one of those arguably might have deserved it.
It’s Joe Gallien. I have his name, address, contact information if he is harassing you or your family. I have already reported him to law enforcement in New Jersey and Ashburnham, MA and the Google Legal Department.
The name is Joe Gallien, and he’s not worth the waste of electrons.
Fortunately, no such issue here. But as I mentioned when I introduced myself here, we have had creepy-stalkery fundamentalist phone calls at the house at times, and that’s why I always post under this pseudonym. One fellow at Amazon wanted to lynch me, and that seemed like a confirmation that anonymity was a good thing.
Good, if you get anything that you consider threatening to you or your family, or harassment of you on the Internet, please contact me privately. Law Enforcement, the US Legal system, and Google Legal Department knows how to deal with these things.
I’m working on my own review, so I’ll wait until I’m done to read Puck’s, if only so I don’t get discouraged by having to compete with his review if it’s up to his usual standard. 
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You are very kind, sir. I hope that when you do read my review, you feel it is up to my usual standard. I have seldom had so hard a time figuring out just what to make of a book as the GAE. It combines things which I think are eminently sensible with things I think are in the strange-flight-of-fancy department. Ultimately it was its cultural role, as a bridge to invite creationists to give up their fear of science, that I felt was the most important aspect of the thing. I still would like to live in a world where such things were unnecessary – but, you know, I’d also like to stop going to the dentist and just have impeccably healthy teeth without having to care for them. Some things we can have, some we cannot.
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Well, when @Faizal_Ali’s review is done, I am hopeful he will send it to Jerry Coyne. 
Maybe consider it like well-developed, “hard” science fiction?
Ah, indeed. But I think that the difficult bits are not the science, which is not fictitious. I would place it more in the Lord of the Rings genre: gods and giants and the like.
I see in a lot of literature a kind of transition – look at Bede, or at an Icelandic saga, and you sometimes get the fantasy bits at the beginning. Did Hengist and Horsa really exist? Or Geoffrey of Monmouth: was Britain founded by Trojans, and named after one Brutus? I think that there is a reluctance, when telling a tale of the history of one’s people, to begin at an arbitrary point. This reluctance no longer constrains modern authors, so Churchill’s Life of Marlborough begins at the Duke’s birth, and his The Gathering Storm begins in 1918. But folk histories want to reach back to the beginning of it all, and that is how I would see Adam and Eve: an attempt to imagine the beginning, not a history of the beginning. But such an account can, of course, be the source of further imaginings.
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The difference of course is that LOTR could not be possibly true in our world, but the GAE could be true, at least there is no evidence against it. That is what makes it, potentially, engaging fiction for someone like you.
The point is that we can enter the story to engage larger questions together, even if we disagree which parts of the story are fact and fiction.
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Really? I tend to think that once one admits the paranormal in the door, all things becomes possible. One ad hoc excuse that depends upon a miracle is, I think, absurd; but once that particular anti-paranormal safety-seal is broken, two ad hocs, or two million ad hocs, are no more absurd than that.
Now, LOTR is perhaps a poor example just because we know that the author himself did not think that he was writing history, so it would be quite peculiar to insist that he really was. But I have a hard time thinking of any religious tradition which does not become compatible with reality if one grants the existence of forces which might have caused them together with the appropriate permits: that the events have left no trace but historical accounts, that they do not predictably recur, et cetera.
This is why it’s very likely that I will not adopt a religion. Once I admit that such-and-such may be so, against all probability, I must take into consideration, and weigh against such-and-such, all of the other things which almost certainly aren’t true, but may be. This is a limitless set – it includes not only those things which do exist in human religious tradition but those which do not. I cannot justify the statement that it is less likely that (a) the planet earth was created by a cosmic platypus which covered its tracks very well than that (b) Adam and Eve were created de novo. Both require things which appear unlikely to be true; both are non-disprovable. Why should one favor the latter?
I think this is the problem of belief. If one is to accept certain propositions on inadequate evidence, that’s not the end of the matter; the immediate crisis is that one must select WHICH propositions to believe upon inadequate evidence. But the only tools that are of any use for that are the ones which allow us to weigh and distinguish between lines of evidence, and these are precisely the tools which, by the nature of the thing, cannot do the job. We have no others.
Undoubtedly we can. But why would we, specifically, with Adam and Eve? I wouldn’t characterize Biblical tales as “fiction” exactly – something more like “folklore filtered through priestly influence” would be a closer, though overly simple summary. I tend to think that, unlike with LOTR, we cannot know much about the motives of the authors – and here we have not only “original” authors, but a whole tradition of folklore, onto which we must append the work of editors and redactors and commenters. Doctrines like the “fall” may be folklore, or they may be part of the not-so-subtle scheme of priestly job security which pervades the OT: man fails to obey the terms of a covenant with God, and bad things happen, so listen to the priests! The Bible bears, as is said, the stamp of its lowly origin.
I do appreciate that there is a good deal of shared “meaning” in our culture associated with traditional stories. I am not convinced that these traditional stories are the best template for understanding, and there is a good deal in them that I wouldn’t like to see become a template. We have events in modern history that teach us things about mankind, too, both good and bad. I find the Holocaust, or the civil rights movement, more telling about what it means to be human.
The importance, I think, of the Adam and Eve discussion is that we have a subset of people in America who are stuck, scared and trapped: jammed into a primitive faith that accepts naïve notions about reality and that treats the denial of facts as a kind of badge of the very best sort of faith. They’ve been taught that if they stumble in doctrine, they will suffer for it, intensely and forever. Like rats in a glue-trap, they need to be liberated with great care, and I think the GAE may be a good step in that direction.
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@Puck_Mendelssohn it comes down to if we trust Scripture. The reason I trust scripture is the evidence I found for the Ressurection. There is nothing even potentially comparable to the Ressurection as grounding for believing LOTR is real, and in fact no one does.
Would you consider writing a review of this book? The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3): N. T. Wright: 9780800626792: Amazon.com: Books
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I read the first two volumes of Wright and did not find it very helpful, so I stopped. He strikes me as a scholarly, but very credulous, fellow. But I think it is fair to say that historical evidence is simply incompetent to establish an event which requires paranormal action.
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I couldn’t agree more with you. I would really struggle to see why on the one hand we would believe the miraculous elements in the Bible, yet on the other hand reject the miraculous elements in the Iliad (to pick one other ancient text out of many). Attempts to shore up the Biblical historicity mostly rely on what is contained in the narrative itself, rather than on independent outside sources - the same goes for the Iliad. Other attempts, such as invoking the rapid rise of Christianity, suffer from a lack of uniqueness. I once was in Salt Lake City and there was a lot of strong belief there in the veracity of the Book of Mormon. Where did that come from, if Joseph Smith made it all up?
When he was 24, Smith published the Book of Mormon. By the time of his death, 14 years later, he had attracted tens of thousands of followers and founded a religion that continues to the present with millions of global adherents.
From Wikipedia.
Why could a prosaic explanation for this phenomenon not be equally valid as an explanation for the rise in Christianity?
Now, if people believe in Jesus on the grounds of personal revelation (typo edited) that is an entirely different matter, and one that I would not argue with.
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Except in the case of the Ressurection…
What independent outside sources are there that confirm the Resurrection?
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Agreed. Now, for myself, that probably wouldn’t work. If I were to have a Damascus-style vision, I would probably see a neurologist.
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