You remind me of Merton’s book, No Man Is an Island. It’s great.
Anyway, corporate sin is a real thing that I acknowledge, but the notion of one individual’s choice to sin corrupting human nature itself is a bridge too far for me. In your example, one person’s bad decision was costly, but it didn’t affect anyone else’s ability to make decisions.
By “corporate sin,” I mean a group of people being judged by God for a collective evil. In scripture it’s usually Israel as a whole, but just as often it’s other nations or tribes.
So here’s a thought experiment: an ancient group of sapiens makes a language breakthrough that allows them to think of everything in a new way. There are trade networks extending 300 km in every direction from them, and they share this breakthrough with neighboring groups that they are in communication with on a regular basis. Those people pass it along to groups they communicate with, and in short order it’s been shared with every sapiens group in Africa.
But this new way of thinking was a double-edged sword. It allowed abstract ideas such as “love” to be expressed, but it also introduced the concepts of good and evil. Over the years, these early humans did what we all do when we reach moral maturity, which is to continue to choose evil even when we finally see it for what it is. We rationalize our way out of it. When early humans as a whole took this path, with the exception of the children in their midst, God withdrew from the scene and “gave them over to their desires,” to borrow from Paul.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. haha
Yes, that helps. I’ve heard some people claim that God had to verbally speak a command to A&E. I don’t think that’s correct. I would argue that God’s purpose, telos, in human evolution was twofold: to make a creature capable not just of love/relationship with God, but also of love/relationship with its fellow creatures. Perhaps we achieved the latter and short-circuited the former?
It’s a tough question. I don’t take the Garden story literally, but the overarching narrative is one of humanity being in the divine presence and then being barred from that presence. What that presence entailed for early humanity can’t be known for certain, as you said, but I don’t think it necessarily required “revelation.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard God’s voice or seen God’s face, but I’ve experienced God’s presence. I believe God was “present” with early humanity every step along the way until we went too far and chose a different path, which is when God “gave us over” to what we wanted.
Yes, the first sapiens is from Morocco 300,000 years ago. It has the elongated braincase of all previous hominins. The genetic evidence from 300 kya-100 kya is extensive mixing of sapiens groups across Africa. The first “globular” sapiens braincase appears around 100 kya, as do the symbolic finds in Blombos Cave in S. Africa. It’s interesting that group in S. Africa may have been genetically isolated for 100,000 years, but they were already in the category of “modern humans” by then. They already had globular brains, modern language and symbolic reference. They were on the same track as everyone else.
Another tough question. Erectus was the first hominin with the basic human “body plan,” though they were smaller in stature than us. They also were capable of speech, though they couldn’t make the whole range of vowel sounds. God’s blessing in Genesis 1 was to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Erectus was the first hominin to venture out of Africa. They made it as far as Eurasia and Southeast Asia, where they had to have the brainpower to cross bodies of water on boats. Erectus survived on Java until about 115,000 years ago.
The descendants of erectus in Africa and Eurasia are Heidelbergensis (in Europe and Africa), Neanderthal and Denisovan. William Lane Craig thinks a historical Adam & Eve began with Heidelbergensis 650,000 years ago. (Newsflash: He’s wrong.) Neanderthal and Denisovan mated in Siberia, and we mated with Neanderthal and Denisovan pretty much every time we ran across them. All of the offspring were fertile and contributed to the human genome. In a scientific sense, if not in every other sense, we were one species.
The only mistake I regret in my previous writing on the subject is positing a population bottleneck that coincided with the explosion of the Toba supervolcano around 75,000 years ago. Toba is a fact, but its worldwide climate effects have been called into question recently.
A population bottleneck isn’t necessary. There was constant geneflow and cultural exchange between H. sapiens populations in Africa for 200,000 years prior to the Out of Africa expansion. The “founder effect” basically reflects the fact that resources began to be overexploited in people’s home region, so a group of youngsters set out to establish new territory. Expand that concept across the globe, and you have a situation where the earliest group (in Africa) is most genetically diverse, and the farther away you get, the less genetically diverse are the populations. That’s essentially the genetic evidence for the Out of Africa event.
It’s late and I’ll have to come back to the other comments. Good thoughts.