Spoke to Kent Hovind!

Hey, @swamidass !

That had never occurred to me! How interesting that is! Another good component to include in the usual “pitch” for Genealogical Adam!

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Here’s my opinion, based on a biblical theology approach that includes genealogical Adam.

The whole business of Eden was a new creation, in which God’s glory would become all in all, through Adam and his chillun (it eventually came through Christ, but that’s another part of the story). But, as we all know A & E’s disobedience led not to eternal life as planned, but to the sentence of death - both spiritual and physical, the theme developed throughout salvation history up to and including the final resurrection of the redeemed through Christ.

On the basis of the fall, then, Eve ought to be the mother of all the dead, not the living at all (taking the implied noun to be the new race in Adam, “dead in sins and trespasses”).

However, in pronouncing sentence on her in Gen 3, Yahweh also offered the hope of redemption through her, in that though sin and death had come through her action, the crushing of the serpent would come through her seed. This theme too is continued in Scripture, being picked up in a few NT passages (for example, it’s part of the significance of Paul’s speaking of Jesus as “born under the Law, born of a woman.”)

Now, the rest of the Genesis protohistory, as has long been recognised, is primarily interested in the line of Seth down to Abraham, and hence to Israel (and hence to Messiah, the promised “seed”). This line is distinguished as the channel for eventual salvation (note that in the time of Seth and Enosh “men began to call on the name of Yahweh” - blessing is still coming through them to mankind, despite everything).

So I suggest that Adam, redeemed by grace although fallen (as Irenaeus insisted way back in the 2nd century, and as implied, immediately after Eve’s naming, by God’s clothing them in Gen 3:21), speaks prophetically here, not sinfully, recognising and echoing the gracious promise implicit in Yahweh’s words of judgement on Eve. So “living” here is being opposed not to “not existing,” ie all those as yet unborn, but to “the dead,” ie those suffering the effects of the fall. That kind of death, after all, is the subject of the whole chapter.

Adam’s naming oif his wide, then, addresses Eve’s role in the reversal of death-as-judgement, not merely her procreative abilities. Genesis is more subtle than that.

All this follows from seeing the Eden account not as “the beginning of the world,” but as the first act in the drama of the new creation, in which categories of “living” and “dead” have a meaning encompassing relationship with God, adoption as his children, and eternity: not just biology. (See for example Matt 8:22 for that same distinction in the NT).

Genealogical Adam lends a great deal of weight to that understanding of the garden account in biblical cointect, but is not necessary to it - Greg Beale has made the case very strongly in his massive “New Testament Biblical Theology.” Whether Kent Hovind has been up to reading that I wouldn’t know, but at Peaceful Science “we’re all skolars, init?”

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And a bit more, tying the above into the specific authorial concerns of Genesis alone, for those doubting the divine oversight of Scripture as a whole.

Whatever the sources used, Genesis as we have it comes from a single author/final editor, who had a purpose for the whole book. We may take that broadly as the promise to Abraham, and how it was sustained until the birth of Israel as the nation of promise, which is predicted in Genesis but fulfilled in Exodus, to which it is the “prequel.” The Israelites and their life in God’s blessing are the focus - those who dwell in “the land of the living” (Ps. 27:13; 52:5; 56:13; 69:28; 116:9; 142:5; Isa 4:3; 398:11, 19-20; 53:8; Jer 17:13; Ezek 26:20; Ezek 32: throughout - note dead foreign kings who once inspired terror “in the land of the living of the living,” ie chosen Israel, their enemy.)

Now women play a very small role in the Protohistory (even Noah and his sons’ wives are not named, though ostensibly universal parents). But once the promise comes to the Patriarchs, their wives become major players, particularly with their provenance (Isaac and Jacob both return to family roots for their wives), and with their fertility problems. Everyone knows about Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah.

It seems that the naming of Eve is likely to be one of the many parallels and resonances deliberately made between the protohistory and the Patriarchal narratives, simply within the book itself, let alone within the wider boundaries of the Torah the Tanakh and the whole Bible.

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God was so glorious that he made this new creation completely without any evidence to scientific inquiry.

I’m not really sure we can blame God for the limits of science.

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I am not blaming God for anything. It is just incredulous to see modern scientific minds make up scenarios that would be not show any records in the fossils, artifacts, and genetics so that a fiction written by ancient pre-scientific power hungry priests can reconcile the cognitive dissonance of religious indoctrination of educated scientific people today.

And yet many of the people who talk about the limits of science also claim that God made the universe on purpose to be understandable. If that’s not quite a contradiction, it’s at least getting close.

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You mean like string theory?

Nope. I am just trying to take legitimate questions seriously.

Many people who are taking the most stubborn anti-science positions are fairly ignorant of what science can and cannot do. The fact that they incorrectly think science can resolve this question is one source of their resistance.

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You obviously never lived when the old one was all there was.

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And neither did you.

I give string theory a better chance at explaining some unknown aspects of the universe that we live in than GA. :sunglasses:

Yep, that’s correct.

People often talk about God making the universe to be intelligible - not only through the tools of science, but also of other fields of knowledge such as philosophy and theology. So there’s no contradiction there.

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The universe is said to be intelligible through science. So yes, there’s a contradiction.

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Source please?

Thank you all for providing feedback to my post. This really helps me to select what points I cover. That particular post was quite long. I don’t provide so much verbiage without careful reflection on what may be of maximum value to the forum. It is always a matter of selective emphasis, and I must choose between very technical analysis and that which can meaningfully engage the average reader who may not have a grounding in general linguistics and Biblical language exegesis. So your comments are a major guide to my efforts. Thank you for taking the time to describe what you found helpful.

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It’s all over the internet and all over this web site. There’s considerable waste of bandwidth here alleging that the sun and moon have the same angular dimension because God wants to help us with astronomy. Sal Cordova and other creationists have claimed that the nested hierarchy of life exists because God wants to show us which parts of the genome are functional. The success of mathematics in describing physics is supposed to be intentional. You haven’t encountered any of that?

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Yes, I have encountered that. The fact that physics is successful begs for an explanation. But the fact that science isn’t successful to explain everything (i.e. why scientism isn’t true) doesn’t create a contradiction. Even if science is limited, it is already massively successful. For that success to be intelligible, one needs a higher-level, non-scientific explanation. (This explanation cannot be another, higher, scientific law, for then we would simply ask why that scientific law exists.) Thus, even this argument presumes that there is a higher level of non-scientific explanation - philosophy - that exists to explain science itself.

Of course, as an atheist, you can bite the bullet and simply say that there is no explanation why physics is successful. But surely it is reasonable for someone to be curious why that is the case. After all, scientists are eternally curious about things within science. So why can’t scientists be curious about the nature of science itself?

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I suppose it does. But is that presumption correct? Is there anything science can’t explain (in principle) that’s capable of explanation? Is there in fact another “way of knowing” that actually works to produce reliable knowledge?

Just because you’re curious doesn’t tell you that there’s actually a way to find an answer. Are you in fact one of those who thinks that the explanation for the efficacy of mathematics is that the universe was designed to be explained?

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That’s not difficult:

  • Mathematical truths are assessed using purely logical reasoning
  • Philosophical truths are deduced via logical reasoning plus some basic intuitive facts
  • Moral and ethical principles are deduced via logical reasoning plus our moral instinct
  • Historical fact and truths is not based on the scientific method
  • Teleological propositions, e.g. “I made a cup of tea to make you happy.”
  • Aesthetic propositions, e.g. “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a musical masterpiece”
  • Finally, the proposition that “science explains everything” itself is not a proposition provable by science, even in principle.

Note that even if science could illuminate many of these areas of knowledge some day, it will never be sufficient to completely eliminate the need for non-scientific reasoning. For example, one could in principle explain our moral instincts as the product of evolutionary forces, but for people who believe in objective morality, that misses the point, as we still need an explanation for why we are compelled to obey our evolutionary instincts.

Now you’re sounding like a creationist who would say “just because you think science will be able to explain the origin of life some day doesn’t mean it actually can!” :wink:

Of course, I don’t know for sure whether there’s actually a way to find an answer. It could be that my instincts are wrong. In the same way, I do not know for sure that other minds exist. I could be living in a computer simulation, for all I know, and that John Harshman is just a figment of my imagination. So there’s no clear way to resolve this conundrum of whether my instinct is right that there is an answer. What I can tell you is that assuming there is an answer (i.e. God exists) “works”, in the sense that the universe and my own life makes much more sense within a theistic framework.

I am sympathetic to that argument. I don’t think it’s an airtight argument, by the way. It’s certainly an interesting one.

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