Moreover, most people did not know this before. It is an advance in our understanding to clarify it isn’t ruled out. If people hadn’t ruled it out, there would be less of an advance.
Of course it does. To pick only one data bit, some of the limestone blocks are signed by the human crews that put them in.
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I didn’t say the aliens didn’t have help. Humans could have been used as slave labour.
If someone’s theology requires a young earth, GAE is not going to help them.
Now you’re equivocating on the meaning of “built”. Even if “built” means “forced slaves to build”, you’re still wrong. We know the laborers were paid, and we know who paid them; not aliens.
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It will help them if their main reason for requiring a young earth is that Adam and Eve have to be recent. GAE removes the connection between Adam & Eve and the age of the earth. It’s not clear how many people would not be YECs if you showed them GAE. That number might be very small, but we’ll know soon enough.
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Maybe they were paid to put their names on the rocks. That would explain why we have hieroglyphs saying they got paid, and why the names of the presumed workers are on some of the rocks. Maybe they were also paid to write, misleadingly, that they participated in the construction work.
I call it the Space-Signature hypothesis, and it’s completely consistent with archaeological evidence, just like the Genealogical Adam hypothesis. The aliens did all of it, then paid people to write a different account of it in hieroglyphs and then to have them make signatures on the rocks.
The Space Aliens™ visited me in a dream and told me this using their vast psionico-telepathic technopowers, so I have evidence besides science for coming up with the Signed-Rocks hypothesis(analogous to having theological, aka biblical grounds for posting Adam and Eve were real people).
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I doubt many. Most of them don’t argue the age of the earth just from human genomics. They talk about geology, cosmology and all sorts of other things.
My sense from working with college students from predominately conservative Evangelical backgrounds is that evolution, in general, isn’t nearly as big of a problem as human origins, specifically Adam & Eve because of the theology involved in the Fall. In the conservative Christian world (to make a sweeping statement), the traditional way of thinking about the arc of the Bible is:
- Creation (monotheism, nature of God, humans as created beings)
- Fall (Adam & Eve and the entrance of sin, because of 1)
- Redemption (Jesus as the “fix” for problem in 2)
- Restoration (New heavens and new earth, Jesus started in 3 what is finished in 4)
That is why creationism vs. evolution has for so long been a core issue, it is seen as an attack on the first part of the story of the Bible. The thinking was, implicit or explicit, if 1 crumbles, then well, I guess Jesus might as well be thrown out. However, enough work has been done by TE/EC that even many conservative Evangelicals will say, well, the point of 1 is the God created it all, it’s not so important how he did it really. But a historical Adam & Eve is where they understand sin as entering the world and where the “need for Jesus” originates and so it has a much higher practical significance. Evangelism and the way Jesus has been presented to many people is a “fix” to their sin problem. If there was no Fall, then what was Jesus’ death for?
So, to summarize that a little – what conservative Christians mostly needed out of “Creation” can be achieved with or without evolution, but there is a lot more debate over whether they can have a “Fall” with or without Adam & Eve. That’s where GAE has significance.
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The big problem in reconciling GAE with the evangelical requirements you mention is in having the fall of two people ends up infecting the entire population with original sin. I’ve seen many attempts at this, but none of them seem to make sense. Still, it might be enough for some fraction of evangelicals. After all, original sin makes little sense even for genetic Adam and Eve.
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It will be interesting to hear your take my book, which has three chapters devoted to just this question.
I have to admit that I’m conflicted here. While on the one hand I do see it a sort of progress that fundamentalist Christians can find some way for themselves to accept the findings of modern science by squaring them with their beliefs, on the other hand I still have to wrestle with the problem that this latest concoction of theology appears to me, I’m sorry to say, just as absolutely ridiculous as the idea it’s purporting to replace.
If Adam and Eve originally carried the sin, then they infected everyone else with the sin against their will and without their consent. How can these people then be at fault or condemned for carrying this original sin?
It’s like original sin is a kind of sexually transmitted disease. Apparently it’s in sperm and egg cells, or does it also transmit through other means? Can talking to an original sin-carrier also infect you? Perhaps merely being in Adam and Eve’s presence transmitted sin to you.
Take one look at Eve’s bosom and you’d get a sinful erection and want to murder Adam in sexual jealousy? And before Adam and Eve, nobody ever had such thoughts? For hundreds of thousands of years, nobody coveted his or her neighbor’s spouse?
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@Rumraket these are good questions that point to grander questions still. The world as we find it operates with inheritance. Can we imagine Justice in a world with inheritance? That is one of the grand questions grappled by these narratives. My book offers ways to think through them, but these are also grand questions. They unsettled simple answers.
I should also add @Rumraket your summary of the of the GAE’s theology is not even remotely accurate. It is ridiculous, likely because you can’t imagine it as anything other than ridiculous.
Turns out there are better ways to understand it. Maybe they are false too, but they aren’t ridiculous.
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Perhaps they aren’t, but I’d have to see them first before I could agree of course.
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That was always the objection to the doctrine of original sin. It was why some groups rejected that doctrine.
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The whole concept of sin is a social construct and not part of the natural world.
Is racism a sin? Or racism just a social construct too?
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Racism is real(as in some people are racist), but the wrongness of racism is a social construct. Even if God exists.
Like Rumraket, I will reserve judgment on that. If they aren’t, that would be quite a new understanding, as all previous understandings have been either silly or reprehensible or (the usual case) both.
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