Has God worked with hominids far longer than we want to believe?

Faith & Science Conversation
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Note to moderators. the links are either to biologos or to a news account. Please don’t make me redo this as my strength is failing.

A few months ago, I posted my view of Eden and the Flood, having taken place .5.5 million years ago in the Mediterranean basis. https://discourse.biologos.org/t/eden-and-the-flood-a-historical-reading-of-genesis-2-3-and-6-9/40770

It generally got the usual reaction Christians have to it–too old, the people who were around then weren’t smart modern people. and then the view is ignored, even though it matches everything the Scripture says about Eden and the flood and doesn’t violate anything scientific.

I raise this again because one of the nice things about my view is that over the 25 years since I first suggested it, nothing has actually come up that disproves it (I will never have actual proof) and the same reasons listed above are the same reasons people 25 years ago used to discount my view.

Today I saw something amazing on the anthro news feeds. Human-like upright walking first occurred on earth 12 million years ago. https://apnews.com/e2f480a39e4047768d4e93de973594ee Note to the moderators this is a news account, not a web page)

While this creature is not representative of what Noah looked like, it illustrates that there are many surprises left in anthropology and to claim that my view counldn’t happen, because modern-like humans didn’t live back then, may be wrong–maybe something akin to our species did live–but were extremely rare and didn’t leave fossil evidence of themselves.

I have already addressed the issue of smaller brain size being irrelevant to intelligences at https://discourse.biologos.org/t/does-a-small-brain-make-you-dumb/40747

This discovery, it seems, is consistent with my view of Biblical history if not a wee bit supportive of my views.

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That’s really interesting, here is a more detailed write up on the specimen from Nature (apart from the paper itself):

Fossil ape hints at how walking on two feet evolved

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The issue is not how long God has worked with hominids. We can take it for granted that God has always been working with the development of all living things. The issue is how long has God communicated with us and thus when this changed from God working on the development of a species with biological alterations to God working with people with the alterations of the way we think.

The problem with pushing Bible stories to 5.5 million years ago is not the issue of biological dis-similarity but the reduction of the Biblical narrative to insignificance by pushing these stories back to a time when we do not see significant changes in the behavior of hominids – basically to a time when the changes were at an evolutionary pace rather than a social pace.

And for what purpose are we sacrificing the significance of the stories? Just so we can dodge the scientific findings with a more literal understanding of the text? Surely if it is a choice between significance and literalism then we would want the former more than the latter.

Consider what do you get when you compare the impact and pace of change due to science with the impact and pace of change due to a communication with God. 5.5 million years compared to 2,500 years thus reduces the impact of the communication with God to something 2000 times less or .05% of the importance of science. This is why a time frame for the Biblical stories closer to the start of human civilization is much more preferable to those who think that a communication with God is important for our development.

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I was glad to see your name again. While I don’t agree with your view of Eden and the Flood, I wanted to thank you for the many essays that you wrote about leaving YEC. They will continue to speak after you’re gone. May the Lord make your remaining path smooth.

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