My theory about the Flood

[Jonathan_Burke (Jon)]

@AntoineSuarez

Question 1:How can we ascertain the time T at which the first Homo sapiens were endowed by God with the sense of law and became capable of sinning against His law?

I don’t believe they were endowed by God with the sense of law. By the time they were homo sapiens, they already had the capacity for moral awareness, and they were already forming social laws, mores, taboos, and norms. They were not yet aware of God’s specific laws however, so they were not responsible to them. Adam and Eve were the first homo sapiens to whom God revealed His law.

@AntoineSuarez

Question 2:How can we ascertain after time T whether a living being deserves or not the status of person and therefore the fundamental right to life?

If by “person” we mean “homo sapiens”, it’s easy; if they’re homo sapiens they are people. If by “person” we mean something else, then that depends on our definition of “person”.

@AntoineSuarez

The answer to Question 2 (“The living human body”) implies among other things that today all modern humans (Australian aboriginals, uncontacted peoples, Americans or any other population), independently of their degree of civilization, deserve the fundamental personal rights, and in particular the right to life. And the same holds for disabled people, PVS patients, children with hydranencephaly, human embryos.

Yes.

@AntoineSuarez

On the one hand, it seems you are conveying the idea that practices and customs Aborigines use today for enacting social laws and establishing penalties come from 40,000 ago. Such an idea doesn’t take account of the so called “Intensification Debate” according to which a strong improvement of social structure occurred around between 3000 and 1000 BCE, that is, after the Flood.

The Intensification Debate has no impact on whether or not the Australian Aboriginals had moral awareness and their own social order and moral laws long before 3,000 BCE. The fact that they had moral awareness and their own social order and moral laws for tens of thousands of years, is not even debated in the literature. It is certainly not part of the Intensification Debate. No one is writing articles asking “Did the Australian Aboriginals have moral laws 30,000 years ago?”.

@AntoineSuarez

When you conclude today that living beings are morally responsible to God’s law and capable of sinning, you do this on the basis that they are human beings living after Time T, and not on the basis of the social skills they may have.

I conclude that living beings are morally responsible to God’s law only when that law has been revealed to them and they are aware of it and convicted of it. I don’t see this as a single date beyond which all people became responsible at the same time. So my basis of their responsibility to moral law is different to yours.

@AntoineSuarez

So Question 1 remains the key question. And the rigorous answer to it is: Vestiges proving sense of law.

Such vestiges are surely legal texts.

No. We also have oral traditions. We also have archaeological evidence of social customs. When we have evidence for executions we know we have a sense of law.

@AntoineSuarez

Such vestiges could also be funerary depictions which clearly express the idea of responsibility toward God in the afterlife, like “The weighing of the heart” in the “Book of the death”.

This doesn’t require texts.