He is technically an HBU faculty member, and visits campus 1-2 times per year. I still haven’t actually met him, though.
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I wonder what GAE’s intestinal bacteria was like. Living in an isolated garden and then “boom” out in the real world with all those nasty viruses and bacteria from all the domesticated animals. Must have been awful for them to acclimate.
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I think the two points I quote above taken from your rendering of Grudem’s position are not consistent alongside the evolutionary accounts of our origins (EO), as EO would make these two points utterly false, assuming that the moral law is universal to all biologically and philosophically indistinguishable hominids (point 6). And, even if we agree that it is not and therefore point 6 is not necessarily in conflict with EO, point 7 remains a major deal breaker for many in the Genesis (and Romans) account(s) that is absolutely inconsistent with EO scenarios.
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Nope, not at all. It all depends how you define “human”. If the “human” group defined here does not include the people out the garden, they just doesn’t count as falsifying evidence.
And THAT, is why the EO scenario becomes totally consistent with Genesis and Romans.
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That is the most oblique statement I’ve ever heard you make. And I have no idea what you’re trying to say.
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I’m on the wire with the book. Give me some time 
Looking forward to talking soon @AJRoberts my friend. Did you see this? Christians in Science: Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility. I hope you follow it, and give your thoughts too as I explain more.
Didn’t want you to miss this:
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Yes, I saw it. Thanks. I had some time this morning to weigh in at PS, and this thread was the most recent one to pop up in my mailbox. So I started here. We’ll see if I have more time to weigh in on other threads later today or later this week.
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That doesn’t have to be complete until 1 AD. What you’re talking about involves a spread all over the world in a few hundred years at most, and in fact the earliest agriculture isn’t even in the Near East. And as I said, it’s not the crops that would have to spread but the very idea of domesticating plants. If it spread by diffusion, we would expect the crops to spread at the same time, as did indeed happen when agriculture entered Europe. Trying to attach the origin of cultivation to GA is a bad idea.
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I would accept an Evangelical’s adherence to Genealogical Adam if it meant that person rejected Adam’s offspring having anything to do with the agricultural revolution.
But if we look at what they are already accepting … I am skeptical that many are going to say “No way!” to the idea that Adam’s kin helped pass along knowledge of agriculture. The odds are high that they will want to lump it all together.
Perhaps. But here you are going from a GA proposal for which there can be no contrary evidence to one that’s clearly falsified by the data. And that seems to be a major problem, right? The benefit of GA is that it doesn’t conflict with what we know. This idea of a single (and quite recent) origin of agriculture is just wrong.
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Yes, GAE has to remain invisible to science and to history to work. It is genius, one must take GAE as a matter of faith, just like the Resurrection.
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How are you falsifying whether Adam’s offspring were or were not traveling to these other centers of civilization and teaching agriculture?
Isn’t that almost as difficult as falsifying the existence of Original Sin?
The latter is a metaphysical proposition, and the former is the stuff of family legends…
No. As I have mentioned twice so far, when people move and diffuse agriculture, the crops go with them. But all the various centers of agriculture have their own crops, descended from wild plants in the area. The movement of farmers out of the Near East and into Europe is an example of how diffusion works. It’s also, I should point out, insulting to all the people outside the Near East to suppose that they couldn’t think of plant domestication on their own.
Show me evidence for this? I don’t know of it…
There is a difference between agriculture (which arises fairly anciently) and permanent cities supported by agriculture. The latter arose recently, and is a way if using agriculture that does seem to have spread across the globe from a single place, often making use of difference local crops and it spread. There is genetic evidence of a major shift to patriarchal communities about 8000 years ago that was temporary, and follows a spread from the middle East first to America. This is after agriculture arises, but precedes the rise of agriculture cities.
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Where do you get this notion? Where is this genetic evidence? What evidence is there, especially, of a spread of cities from the Middle East to America?
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Seen this yet?
Also looked at the dates at which agricultural cities arise across the globe.
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Very interesting. Doesn’t support the claim that agriculture spread from a single place, or that cities spread from a single place, or in fact that anything spread from a single place. But it’s certainly interesting. As far as that report goes, there seem to have been a large number of separate Y-chromosome bottlenecks around that time. I’d be interested in seeing the real paper.
Ooh. It isn’t paywalled.
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This has been discussed by David Reich in his book and in other works. The limited diversity of Y-chromosome is found in the total change in ancestry in Europe after 5000 years ago from the Steppe.
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I am unable to understand what that part of the sentence means. Could you clarify?
Spread of agriculture is best looked at in the spread of wheat and barley in Middle East and Europe, rice in two types (long and short grains) in Asia and India, and corn in the Americas. The gene flow of crops follows the human migration.