I am just guessing here … but I think he wanted to focus on what he was doing, and he hoped that “not dissing Joshua” would be considered sufficiently diplomatic.
Sometimes “hope” is overly optimistic.
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That does not appear to be the case.
He was asked about this precise quote from WLC:
Note that WLC is reference Venema specifically here. He is the popularizer.
Rather than responding to the question, he changed the topic to discus Richard Buggs. Rather than admitting error, he made another fallacious argument, and refused to retract his false claim. Keep in mind, he was directly asked about this by the podcaster. He refused to answer the question, he refused to admit error, and instead just changed the topic. He was so smooth about it, the podcaster was either complicit or bamboozled.
I don’t think this is changes my theory: I think he wanted to focus on what he was doing …
… and he hoped that “not dissing Joshua” would be seen as sufficiently diplomatic.
Venema certainly disses me in private. Given that fact, I’d prefer he dissed me in public. Frankly, I don’t care, because I’m just asking him to be honest, not to like me.
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@gbrooks9, you shook an interesting tree, such that Venema writes:
I mention that the historicity of Adam is not something that science can weigh in on. Genetics can address the question of unique genetic descent from an ancestral couple. As long as one is not insisting on sole genetic progenitorship then you’re within what science allows (and even with @RichardBuggs’s hypothesis, which as I discuss in the podcast I do not find plausible because of a lack of proposed mechanism) it would have to be back around 700,000 years ago, as we established) . That was the extent of my intent. I’ve written elsewhere on genealogical approaches, and I haven’t changed my opinions.
He is referring to this article (http://henrycenter.tiu.edu/2017/07/response-to-the-symposium-part-1/), where he argues the Genealogical Adam is racist. @jongarvey, wrote about this once (The racist Adam | The Hump of the Camel). What do you make of it @jongarvey?
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Given that genealogical science was popularised early on by Steve Olson specifically to demonstrate the futility of racism, it’s nonsense to brand Genealogical Adam as such. We are “of one blood” not just because we branched off from a root once upon a time, but because we are part of the constant mix of the family meshwork - and the spiritually significant strand in that mesh is Adam, called into covenant with Yahweh.
The only even plausible “racism” charge is that, for a period of two millennia or so, whatever it was that Adam had for the first time was not universal.
The GA model would, I imagine, allow all kids of flxes for those wishing to exonerate God from modern hate crimes, as if he needed to be. But if what I’ve descrived is racist, then so is the idea, scientifically, that there was at any stage in the past an emergent population of newly-gifted Homo sapiens that excluded any residual members of their less gifted predecessor around the world. And theologically it’s just as racist on God’s part for Abraham to be living his life within the Covenant promise of God whilst a tribe an the Amazon wasn’t.
Ashwin raised the issue another way - that peoples who regard their own religion as primordial might see themselves as targeted as inferior by others who, plausibly, were “in Adam” first. Once again, I have to ask what actual injustice there is in the Egyptians, for example, receiving the Christian gospel centuries before the Saxons, which was clearly intrinisc to the way God set up the gospel.
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