William Lane Craig: Predetermined Conclusions on Adam?

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

@pevaquark

You have just accused WLC of intellectual dishonesty. This is extremely presumptuous. You are flat wrong on the facts.

I see. Well thanks for clarifying that he isn’t actually bound by a statement of faith that has very specific requirements on what conclusions are allowed about Adam. I guess that he gets a pass since he is WLC, but for anyone else to actually work as faculty at Biola, they need to agree with the statement.

He is also not full time employed there, and BioLa’s belief statement does not have normative force. The internal politics here are complex, and not worth getting into. Suffice to say that a lot of people at Biola disagree with the belief statement. The fact is that he is already public in disagreeing with this precise clause. I’m not sure what more could happen to him for disagreeing with it again.

@pevaquark

WLC is much bigger than Biola.

Not quite sure what kind of statement this is, though I’ll have to think about it.

He is a big name famous apologist that they have teach a bit in their masters program. He doesn’t even live in CA. He lives at Atlanta. They have him on faculty for bragging rights.

@pevaquark

WLC wasn’t discussing my model in this podcast.

Since you were mentioned around the time of it being a logical possibility that there could have been a primordial couple some 500,000 years ago, I thought that perhaps he was getting some of these ideas from you.

That is from me. Do you remember the work we did on TMR4A? Heliocentric Certainty Against a Bottleneck of Two? It is referenced here: Story Three: Recent Sole-Genealogical Progenitor Adam.

@pevaquark

Granted it appears that he is still bound by whatever he happens to find in his investigation into reading Genesis 1-11 in its original context- but I can at least appreciate his effort in doing so. But what about other ancient scientific perspectives that are in the Bible?

That is exactly what he is looking at, and I have to say there were some remarkable revelations the Dabar conference. He is devoting 2 years to studying this.

@pevaquark

What if there is no way to shake it that this people group really did think they came from a single couple a few thousand years ago?

If he comes to this, he will probably end up in the Genealogical Adam camp. This is exactly what some are predicting, though I don’t think anyone knows for sure.