Just in general, I would not see that people saying they believe in a version “guided by God” was not, at least, acceptance of evolution. It still, at least I THINK , accepts the known ages of earth and Universe.
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Agreed. I completely agree. I should have included “and accepts Old Earth as well”.
G.Brooks
True. And the problem just gets worse. They also would’ve been exposed to evil and sin within their community before they were plucked out and set into a Garden with only themselves and God to keep them company. How old were they when they were chosen? Infants? Toddlers? Adolescents? Adults? If infants or toddlers, then God better be in a talkative mood for a decade or so just to teach them language. If adolescents or adults, they were already sinners. God would’ve had to wipe their memories clean before starting over with the preternatural gifts.
And don’t even get me started with a de novo Adam & Eve.
I agree with your first statement, with the qualification that I don’t agree to Aquinas’s “rational soul” concept.
On the rest, I agree it’s impossible to know exact details of who, how many and when. But it’s not impossible to make an educated guess. Bear with me, because if you want to hold onto a literal Adam & Eve based on the Thomistic “rational soul” principle, I think I can at least give you a timeframe when that would be most likely to have transpired.
I’ve already mentioned a timeframe when “abstract thought” first became possible for H. sapiens – roughly 65-75,000 years ago. I base this on several converging lines of evidence:
- That’s just prior to the Out of Africa expansion of H. sapiens. Anything physically or culturally common to all humans had to appear among the population prior to our dispersal around the globe. (Otherwise you wind up with the morally repugnant solution of subhuman H. sapiens existing side-by-side with “fully human” descendants of Adam for millennia until they integrate. It’s gross.)
- The globular brain (the “language-ready brain”) appeared between 100,000-40,000 years ago. The midpoint of that evolutionary process is 70,000 years ago.
- Trade networks first appeared 1 million years ago and were 100 km long. That indicates improved communication and lessened aggression toward strangers. About 100,000 years ago, they suddenly expanded to 300 km, and about 40,000 years ago they jumped to 1000 km. The midpoint, again, is about 70,000 years ago.
- Symbolic behavior appeared in Blombos cave in S. Africa around 100,000 years ago. By 40,000 years ago, “Venus” fertility figurines could be found almost everywhere, “mythical creatures” (like the ivory man with the head of a lion) appeared, probably a representation of a shaman wearing a headdress, and cave paintings of large prey associated with magical hunting rituals. Romans 1:18-25, anyone? (…their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.)
- The first recorded intentional burial in Africa happened around 75,000 years ago. The bodies are laid in the grave on their sides with hands under their heads as if sleeping. The first inkling of hope in life after death? By 40,000 years ago, H. sapiens everywhere were being buried with “grave goods” that would accompany them in the afterlife.
Lol. He was right. Toddlers have to be taught the rules, and it’s a process that takes years. Don’t bite, don’t hit, don’t steal, don’t lie. Basically, the Ten Commandments.
It’s why John Walton’s books were titled “The Lost World of …”
Unlike ANE mythology, where every catastrophe is chalked up to the capriciousness of the gods, in Genesis 1-11 human choice is the cause of disaster. God even seems a little caught off guard in Genesis 3. “What have you done?!” haha
I get your sentiment, though I don’t agree with it. But why is a historical A&E necessary for humanity’s first contact with the Divine?
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Okay. But infants and toddlers have souls without having the capacity for abstract reason. If they develop normally and don’t die in childhood (a big “if” before modern medicine), they acquire the capacity for metaphoric thought and abstract reasoning around the age of 10-13. So Christian theology accepts the idea that newborns have souls without the capacity to sin or think abstractly. And some of these newborns will die before acquiring those capacities or never develop those capacities.
I realize Thomists have a lot of “work-around” explanations, but Occam’s Razor tells me the simplest explanation is that the possession of a God-given soul doesn’t have anything to do with abstract reasoning.
If immature modern children possess souls without yet possessing the capacity for abstract thought, I see no reason why early humans a million years ago could not be endowed by God with souls before they were capable of abstract thought.
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I’ll beat a dead horse!
What are we really talking about here? At the very least, God selecting an Adam & Eve out of an existing population meant removing them from their family and community and placing them in the Garden for the purpose of his test.
All well and good in theory, but let’s put the rubber to the road. Did God snatch an infant from his/her mother’s breast and place them in the Garden? Toddlers? It only gets worse from there. If anyone has an explanation for how God selected two individuals from an existing population and placed them in the Garden without causing tremendous heartache and confusion for their parents, siblings, relatives, community, etc., please offer it up. I’ll be glad to hear it, cuz I don’t see a way out of that conundrum.
Note Abraham’s household of something like 70 men, women and children not counted; they were all circumcised and thus all became “sons of Abraham”. And when Exodus records their descendants emerging from Egypt, a “mixed multitude” came with them, and all became Israelites. God was adding to His people all along the way, not just by blood.
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The difference tends to amuse me because I don’t care what people believe (except when they get facts wrong) so long as it doesn’t conflict with the text. But logical conflict works as well; YEC conflicts with the text in numerous ways but the big one for many people is that it necessarily requires God to be a deceiver – which is contrary to a plethora of texts (though I will note that He apparently isn’t adverse to making use of the occasional lying spirit).
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Not necessarily – I use similar phrasing when tutoring college algebra and stuff – “What did you just do?” or “What did you do here?” doesn’t come because I don’t know but because I want the student to examine and recognize an error.
Interestingly, most students generally do better at recognizing and admitting their goofs than Adam and Eve did, which is why I regard favorably the idea that the real sin wasn’t the fruit being eaten, it was the denial of responsibility.
It depends on presuppositions. I knew a Greek Orthodox priest who vigorously defended the Jungian idea that we are all connected, and addresses the Fall that way: Adam and Eve passed on the flaw by contaminating the common human nature – rather Platonic, actually, and much easier to defend than Augustine’s juvenile views of propagation. One of my grad school professors was a definite Platonist about it; he maintained that all humans are metaphysically linked and so share a “vast pool of rebelliousness”, and though he didn’t quite attribute the Fall to that (his institution required belief in a literal Adam and Eve and a metaphysical inheritance of a sin nature) he held that it explained why certain evil movements in history spread their sway over large number of people rapidly. Then there was the philosophy prof who held that “soul” was a substance that budded off into individual souls, explaining how sin was passed on, and also that impurity of the soul – “sinful nature” – got passed along not just via marriage but any sexual relationship.
Meanwhile modern Westerners tend to think of humans in production-line terms, so the question seems to be made into wondering where in the production process sin gets inserted.
Sorry I’m still catching up. Both of you seem to misunderstand an archetype. An archetype is a literary technique where the prototypical character, in this case ha’adam and ha’issah, embody both the individual and all of humanity. An archetype is literally the human journey personified in an individual character in the story.
That’s why Eve’s dialogue with the snake and decision to eat from the fruit has resonated with everyone from every culture, whether male or female, down through history, while similar myths have crashed and burned. The “fall” is archetypal – “the woman” represents all of humanity and individually each one of us when we come of age and acquire the knowledge of good and evil. Everyone since has followed that prototype – we all come of age and rationalize a way to choose selfishly versus what we know to be good.
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Then we’re all screwed because of someone else’s bad decision. I don’t buy it.
Sinfulness has been with us from the beginning. We grew up with it surrounding us before we knew how to give it a name. The serpent appears without warning in Gen. 3, and it’s described as one of God’s creatures. That’s more than a hint at sin/temptation’s natural origins.
When my sister was a quality engineer, one person’s bad decision ruined 4k circuit boards – and if it had been at the start of the particular process it would have ruined three times that many – an entire run.
The idea that we are rocks, islands utterly unconnected, is a modern conceit; if we are in actuality parts of a whole, then all being contaminated by one individual’s error is perfectly reasonable.
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I should clarify my position for you Jay. What I was trying to get at was if I wanted to take anything from the A&E story and hold it as necessary fact for our humanity’s history, it would be the Divine revealing itself to humanity. The exact details don’t matter and I totally agree that it doesn’t have to be a flesh and blood A&E couple. I would find it incredulous that God would develop us with a capacity for relationship but not reveal himself to us when we were able to receive that communication. Hope that helps a bit.
There have been evidence with archeological findings that some groups of early humans dispersed within Africa 300kya and very very recent evidence that some Southern Africans have been genetically isolated for 100k years. This on top of the issue on the argument whether to classify other hominids as “humans”. Regardless, I find it difficult to posit any time unless we go back many many years prior to the Out of Africa expansion, where all “humans” are together. What are your thoughts on this in dealing with any historical A&E necessitating close proximity of the entire race? I don’t think migration of early humans is necessarily a problem with a non-literal A&E but clearly I see some difficulties with just these few points of evidence.
-Liam
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(post deleted by author)
When reading all the comments, it seems we have a challence, the same we face in most threads on this Forum. The debate is not solely between persons that have an identical rationale, it is between worldviews that have differing starting points, assumptions and rationale of thinking. What seems rational, even selfevident for me, is not that within another worldview.
Getting through the borders of worldviews is not easy. It demands careful thinking of why the others seem to make ‘unfounded’ claims and trying to justify my arguments with a logic that is acceptable within the other worldview. Otherwise, our comments are not likely to affect the opinions of those having a different worldview. We may get likes from those that share our worldview but otherwise, commenting becomes wasted time and energy.
I am currently reading books about worldviews. One book* uses Biologos as an example of one position that could perhaps be called a worldview. Although the first pages seem to neglect the diversity of interpretations within Biologos (- I have just started the book so I do not know the rest -), it seems to point correctly to how the differing worldviews do direct our thinking in ways that leads to differing paths and conclusions.
What I wrote may be selfevident but it is good to remind about the challenge from time to time to keep the debates beneficial for all.
This comment is not directed against any person, rather it is for all of us, including me.
=========
*: ‘A worldview approach to science and scripture’ by Carol Hill.
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Thank you Kai for this reminder.
To be vulnerable for one moment, I think the variety of worldviews presented here, for the most part, are all trying to reconcile Christian doctrine with the widely accepted ToE. How one does that with any particular doctrine with Christianity can go numerous ways. I myself honestly am just starting that journey of taking the implications of evolution on Christianity seriously. I’m not super dead set in my ways yet lol. When we come into these conversations, we usually have our own carved puzzle piece ready to show others why that’s the best solution to a particular dilemma. The challenge remains is what happens when another person presents their own puzzle piece (or how the puzzle fits together) and is equally as confident in its truthfulness? How do we respect each other’s puzzle pieces in a way that doesn’t undermine their faith at all? Because something underneath these discussions lie the fact that any particular piece of the puzzle could be the thing that kept them believing in God. Or how they found a way out of a fundamentalist viewing. Of course when someone undermines that belief, even though both are Christians both earnestly seeking the truth, it is hard to get around our defensiveness to what we hold dear. And I think for all of us it’s hard to let go of the certainty of those puzzle pieces fitting together nicely in our own paradigm (worldview). Even for me, sometimes I get afraid that if one puzzle piece gets taken out, the whole thing crumbles. I think it’s a good reminder that we’re all (mostly) together here trying to figure this out, and we should all be open to challenge our beliefs and certainty. If we keep an open mind, we might find out that someone else’s puzzle piece fits a bit more nicely with the overall puzzle.
I think something that would always be helpful is just to ask more honest questions about their beliefs. Ask them have they thought about different implications or have they considered “XYZ” situation. To me, it’s better for someone to be allowed to further explain their belief before another person just simply tells what the other person’s belief actually implies. Maybe helping other people develop their beliefs would be a good start rather arguing simply against it. Obviously is difficult when many threads are started as questions, and with questions you get many different answers.
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Another perspective (worldview?) on that is that ToE and Christianity have been on cordial visiting terms with each other for quite some time already but that a large swath of evangelicalism in the U.S. has spent lots of ink and effort over the last century trying to unreconcile them. It’s similar to the same puzzlement that two visiting friends in a room might have on being informed that they’re actually enemies. One surmises that the rumor-mongers outside spreading this “news” must not know either of the real friends very well (which actually seems to be the case here)!
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I would absolutely agree that the historical trajectory of Christianity with ToE from the 1800s has mostly been cordial and hasn’t seemed irreconcilable to those Christians who embraced it. In my journey on understanding ToE and what seems rapidly apparent here, is that there are so many implication of ToE within Christian doctrine and theology that it’s hard to keep up with. (At least when we get to Abraham in the Biblical narrative, ToE seems to have litte effect.) Especially when new scientific evidence causes us to reconcider certain worldviews within ToE and theistic evolution. Evident as this discussion here on A&E, ToE doesn’t necessarily allow us for a straightforward position. To me I struggle when many leading Christians within the TE community say ToE is easily reconcilable with Christianity and yet we’re still debating on how to reconcile. It’s easy to say God used ToE to bring forth humanity, but it’s another thing to figure out what that actually looks like. Obviously it is possible as many people are doing here, but I do want to be charitable to those who don’t see the picture easily. I dont think its easy to see the full picture, but I think the journey of trying to figure it out is a harder but more worthwhile journey than taking the “certainty” of a literal YEC view. And I think that’s where the convincing needs to happen. Personally, I don’t think you give a nice little bow-wrapped gift of theistic evolution to a YEC folk; you must invite them in to a much more challenging and complex but rewarding experience/journey into TE. I think it’s more important to be honest than to give folks another false sense of certainty.
-Liam
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Nice reply! - and yes, I need the reminder not to just stew in my own certainties and imagine that others should just easily land in the same place.
The “straightforward” position being the need for all parts and characters in the story to be literal in the historical/journalistic sense. That’s a part that got smuggled in with modernity that so many have accepted uncritically and that therefore is ripe for questioning. The objection then is “wait a minute - what do you mean ‘smuggled in recently!’? - if Paul & co. all assumed this within their understandings, then our insistence on the primacy of literal/historical understandings is nothing more than a faithful continuation of theirs, right?” And that’s what I would contest. It’s not the same as theirs! And they gave no such primacy to that approach, as @Marshall has aptly reminded us with how Paul discusses lineages of Adamic or Abrahamic or Sarah / Hagar descendants. They were not pitting their own natural observations against “scriptural” ones and warning their audience to discount what could be seen from nature, while privileging the scriptural. For them there was no separations of ‘books’ - where creation displays one thing, but their readings of the law and the prophets something else. No; it was all one whole seamless cloth. In fact (from the original testament itself!) we learn that one way to know if a prophet was false or not was to see if what they spoke of was actually true, or came to be! So there was an assumption that we can test and discern for ourselves whether our teachers speak truth or not (a discernment further encouraged in the New Testament as well.) So in that light, I see it as a new and modern assumption now (that remains one of many blind spots for YECs - but a critical one) that tries to tear that seamless cloth in two (or subsequently, and worse yet - tries to stitch back together a new ‘biblical’ worldview that uses a highly distorted kind of science not based in the created reality easily seen by everyone else).
I know that still leaves your A&E specifics unanswered - and per your last response, I hope that I (or others) can try to address it in ways that honors the struggle and journey to see all of this in a coherent enough way to at least not be a stumbling block. Maybe more later.
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Which is a lousy way to view the story in the first place!
A number of the church Fathers didn’t believe the account was literally true yet acknowledged it as authoritative. Why? Because the source is ultimately divine. It’s only in our shallow modern Western worldview that the limitation on truth comes down to “facts”. Those Fathers quoted from it and did theology from it not because it contained facts but because it contained truth about the relationship between God and humans.
None of what’s in the opening chapters of Genesis was written as literal history; most wasn’t meant as anything we would count as history, and yet all the literary forms have one thing on common: for the purpose of grasping the message, taking the story literally works just fine – just don’t go denying the deep messages that emerge in other ways, e.g. by knowing what kind of literature each one is.
For myself, I’m just looking at the text and asking, “Does approach X come out contrary to the text?” If it doesn’t, then concern over its ‘truth’ is secondary at best; there is no theology to be derived from the science, the concern is being honest about the data. The ToE doesn’t conflict with anything the text is trying to teach, so I don’t bother with it except when people are being dishonest; YEC inherently trashes the text, so I come down on it hard.
And it’s important to remember that making anything in Genesis critical for faith is putting the cart before a magnificent steed: the foundation of faith is found in the Incarnation, with its epitome at the Cross. In terms of faith, we should look around and see “Jesus only” – because He’s what the scriptures are all about, not about science or history or culture or any other human thing.
I end up tending to tell people that they are trying to make a birthday cake with papier mache – science is no more a proper ingredient for theology than paper strips are for a nice cake.