Then while I was out at Talbot I spent a Saturday with the folks at Reasons To Believe (Hugh Ross’s ministry) which is based in Covina, California. There we had two panel discussions on the historical Adam that were extremely stimulating. The first one in the morning featured Joshua Swamidass and his proposed hypothesis for the historical Adam. We had then respondents to Josh including Andrew Loke who was Skyped in from Hong Kong and Ken Keathley from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Then in the afternoon, Fuz Rana of RTB gave a quite different proposal. Reasons To Believe is revising their theory of the historical Adam to put him earlier in time, around 150,000 years ago rather than merely 40,000 years ago. I think this is commendable. They are following the evidence where it leads rather than trying to shape the evidence to fit their theological conclusion. So they’re weighing this new model. I was on a panel responding to them along with Nathan Lenz, who is a secular scientist that’s interested in the dialog between science and theology and accompanied Josh Swamidass to this conference. We had a very good conversation, very charitable, open. Evangelicals are really looking for good models of how to understand the historical Adam. There is a plethora of different proposals out there. I encouraged the RTB folks to look at putting Adam even further back into the past, not a mere 150,000 but much earlier than that based upon the archaeological evidence that we have for distinctively modern human behavior that is hundreds of thousands of years old. So that was a fun time.
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Is anybody else getting a completely botched display of this page—a different version every time one hits the F5-key to reload the page?
I think the background graphic of the Genealogical Adam & Eve descent chart is confusing the Discourse Software.
I’ve never before gotten such a bizarre discombobulation of the page elements on a PS thread.
I brought up the page in Chrome’s DEVELOPER TOOLS and the window is filled with red error messages.