Where? All over the globe at once or a specific place like the Middle East?
My understanding is that the human cultural âbig bangâ at this historical mark was global, not regionally confined. I take that as a sign of an instantiated change to early human brain functioning as taking root and rapidly spreading among the population, as described in the transition from Genesis 1:26, to what culminated in the 1:27 description --however long it took, since the Hebrew verb 'bara is completely silent on the notion of duration. Itâs a spiritual and socio-cultural change of enormous magnitude, not simply a âlightening boltâ moment where, --volia! --something new exists that had no prior constituent. Thatâs the âpoofâ interpretation which so many are enamored with, without a good linguistic basis from the text.
Your comments, @jongarvey ?
So taking your 50-40 kya mark as global, we (homo sapiens) have a history for the next 30-40 ky (until the beginnings of agriculture) of doing pretty much the same, (language, culture, tool making, hunter/gatherer life style) as we had for the previous 50,000 years (100 kya - 50 kya). Not great advances nor leaps. However the number of living human species did go from many to just one during that time period.
There does seem to be a leap forward in culture c50-40K, but how sudden and how global it was is uncertain. Iâm also a little unhappy at its vulnerability to new discoveries of older cultural advances from better techniques. Still, Iâve seen the artifacts from ice-age Europe and theyâre astonishingly good. Ice age man was our intellectual equal, and culturally sophisticated. But that, as Patrick says, is not the whole story, because culturally the Neolithic (and its immediate precursor) was explosive. But the equally explosive event of civilisation may be from the same, or separate, causes.
Iâm currently thinking about whether Gen 1:27 is intended to imply a step-wise change, or simply to say what mankind was by the time we get to Genesis 2. Although I donât think the text itself says either for definites, what is interesting is the apparently universal worldwide distribution amongst the less civilized peoples of a primordial religion that is, essentially, monotheistic.
The work was done early in the twentieth century (Lang, Schmidt are key names), and really demolished the evolutionary view of religion that had been in vogue amongst anthropologists, and blinded them to key data that contradicted evolutionary assumptions. Basically, the more primitive the culture, the purer the concept of an ethical, single, non-embodied sky God.
Since the signs of that even in existing cultures had to be sought behind rituals, lesser gods, demons and magic (all showing signs of being later accretions), weâre not going to see evidence for it in archaeology - but itâs likely to have been there, and it certainly pre-dates the Neolithic revolution, which seems more associated with degeneration into idolatry and priestcraft (actually what might be expected from the Eden event, in my book).
The question, maybe unanaswerable, is when that primitive ethical monotheism appeared, and how it came to be so widespread. It seems to arise from human nature, but that aspect of human nature could be explained by saltations or otherwise.
Incidentally, biblical studies was apparently late in getting the message that religion isnât evolutionary, and the âhistory of religionsâ school is still influential in reconstructing Israelite history. So, for example, signs that some people thought Yahweh was married to Ashtaroth are taken as primitive, whereas ethnology suggests married sky-gods are a late and degenerate development, for the Creator God doesnât do marriage, death, or evil.
I havenât fully developed my thinking on this yet, but had already long ago concluded that Genesis 1 is about a natural, uncorrupted but âdistantâ worship of the High God of heaven, and Genesis 2 about covenant relationship and a new creation⊠that appeared to be abortive because of sin, but sets the narrative of the whole of the rest of the Bible, culminating in Christ.
The Genesis 1 situation, however, is potentially very stable - you could have a pretty stable, happy and relatively easy hunter gatherer world living at peace with nature and God for many millennia⊠but, I suspect, missing out on great things as well as bad things.
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Can we vote on that?
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Truth doesnât seem to come even from educated consensus, in many areas. The history of overturned consensus seems to be part of the history nobody ever seems to learn from.
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Tell us about this supposed leap forward in culure 50 -40,000 years ago. What are some of the features of this? cave art? better tools?
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Clearly Genesis is talking about an Ancient Middle Easterner view of culture, language, cities, agriculture as it existed 3000 to 4000 years ago in that region of the known world. The writers had no idea that mankind when through hundreds of thousands of years in of a worldwide stone age, hunter gatherer society and culture.
Better than that - an argument from authority.
No, thatâs Genesis 2. I was addressing Genesis 1.
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oh right, the part of Genesis that Hugh Ross says is about the Big Bang.
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Possibly, though in fairness he would probably restrict that to the beginning of Gen 1, rather than v27. Not my approach, anyway.
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Hugh Ross only says that of verse 1, since it clearly states that the universe had a beginning, in a suprisingly accurate conception, which totally defied the long history of pagan views of a kind of gradual emanationism within an eternal universe as an explanation for the origin of âthe gods.â Here we have, instead, a single, transcendent and sovereign God Who sets it all in motion, at a definite point in time, and remains actively involved with it, because He delights in it!
The close connection between better tools and thus, more successful hunting, combined with the contolled use of fire for cooking, and thus making more nutrition bioavailable, with burgeoning brain function and sizing, is a triumvirate of mutually reinforcing causation which must, at least in part, account for the acceleration in development. Nice work, God! Any faster pace, and humans become âtoo effectiveâ super-predators before the current stabile environmental window. Managing entire ecosystems is not childâs play.
I tend to give thanks and accolades not to an invisible God but to the creativeness of social humans who advanced civilization for over a million years so that we can live long productive lives in comfort. Way to go Homo Erectus!
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Yes, youâre right, @Patrick, even God has difficulty steering parked cars. Itâs all part of the mutual delight when we act in concert with Him!
How about another helping of spaghetti? : )
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The more I look, the more orchestrated the process is - but the less amenable to analysis on some simplistic model, least of all evolution, which doesnât seem to cast much biological light on the period in question, and has really outlived its usefulness in terms of anthropology, sociology, history of religion, and so on - in most of those it held back progress in real causes - as, in biblical studies, the German Religionsgeschichtliche Schule did for a century or more (just had to get that word in somewhere!).
Patrickâs âhumanityâs long research programâ appears to be that kind of âexplains all and nothingâ methodology. Where we can check it way back(as for example at Göbekli Tepe) we find religion and ritual preceding the cultural changes that were previously thought to have given rise to them.
At the other end of history we find the onset of modern science developing from theological changes both gradual and revolutionary.
In both cases there are clearly other factors involved - from overpopulation to natural resources to new technology to politics to often-invisible things like individual human genius and individual divine inspiration.
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Yes, those pesky âinvisible causesâ are the things we canât easily account for --love, rationality, aesthetics, enhanced sociability, the emerging capacity for abstract thought, interspecies altruism⊠the list goes on and on. Hence, the corrosive acid of oversimplification has its unwanted effect on our models and morals and moods.
ââYou neglected the Rock who begot you, And forgot the God who gave you birth.â â Deuteronomy 32:18 NASB
Several creation stories start with the waters of chaosâŠ
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This is the only one that starts with a stated beginning to everything.
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The Egyptians had a myth cycle, regarding Atum, that also started with the waters of chaos.