Hi @John_Harshman, @Ashwin_s and @BenKissling,
I presented good scientific evidence in my OP that human language did not emerge overnight, but over many thousands of years. Depending on how you define it, language either emerged about 600,000 years ago (with Heidelberg man) or between 200,000 and 70,000 years ago (in Homo sapiens). But it certainly wasn’t an overnight affair.
I also presented strong evidence for the occurrence of symbolic behavior in Neanderthals, some 130,000 years ago. Unless you believe that God created two races of intelligent beings, that means the common ancestor of both (say, Heidelberg man) must have been truly human, too - but if we go that far back (at least 600,000 years ago), we can find no trace of an overnight breakthrough in human abilities.
I presented further evidence that human morality - in particular, altruism and self-sacrifice for the good of the group - go back at least 500,000 years, with evidence for long-term care of the sick going back 1,500,000 years and big-game hunting (which required a high degree of public co-operation and a willingness to put one’s life at risk for the good of the group) going back 700,000 years. In my book, anyone who’s willing to lay down their life for others is displaying truly human moral behavior. Once again, we can identify no sharp beginnings here.
Finally, I presented evidence that religious worship did not appear suddenly in the archaeological record, but that it probably arose less than 100,000 years ago.
Taken together, the scientific evidence suggests that whenever true humans emerged, it didn’t happen instantaneously. Please note that I’m not saying that true humans actually appeared gradually; I’m just saying it sure looks that way, judging from the evidence.
I’m aware that some readers want to shoehorn human beginnings into the last 100,000 years. But that ignores the evidence for symbolic behavior in Neanderthals (not to mention the evidence for modern human behavior), as well as the evidence for language (in the broad sense) in Neanderthals (and presumably Heidelberg man), and finally, the evidence for morality in Heidelberg man and late Homo erectus - all of which point to a much earlier beginning, over half a million years ago. And if I had to choose a date for “Adam,” I’d nominate that time (but see below).
I also don’t think that an individual (such as Heidelberg man or late Homo erectus) that’s prepared to engage in long-term care of sick adults and children, and even lay down their life for others, deserves to be mentally categorized as child-like. Those sound like very adult-like capabilities to me.
But as I point out in my postscript, humans have only been religious for less than 100,000 years. For most of human existence, humans have been apatheists. “An apatheist is someone who is not interested in accepting or rejecting any claims that gods exist or do not exist. The existence of God(s) is not rejected, but may be designated irrelevant.” (Wikipedia) See also here. That in itself is an alarming conclusion for Christians.
Could there have been a brief flowering of belief in God some 600,000 years ago, when God first revealed Himself to humans (Heidelberg man), only to be rejected (in what we now call the Fall) and subsequently forgotten for 500,000 years, only to be rediscovered some 100,000 years ago? I suppose it’s possible. But any honest-minded believer must admit that this is pure speculation that runs counter to the evidence available.
On the other hand, if we insist on confining human history to the past 100,000 years, then we have to explain the puzzling spectacle of a species (Neanderthal man) that was like our own in so many ways, including even symbolic behavior, not to mention a pretty complex language (even if it wasn’t recursive), a capacity for abstract thought (modern human behavior), and a sense of morality that was much like ours, except that it didn’t extend to objects, such as symbolic art - which hardly matters in my book. To categorize Neanderthal man as less than truly human seems to me to be arguing in the teeth of the evidence.
So there’s the puzzle that I’ve laid out before you. And for a Christian, it is a genuine puzzle - not an insoluble one, to be sure, but one whose solution defies our best intellectual efforts. And it’s a puzzle that would certainly make me hesitate to embrace Christianity, if I were an outsider. I think it’s fair to categorize it as an unanswered objection to Christianity, because no-one has come up with a convincing answer yet.
That was what I wanted to say. Cheers.