My explanation in the context of the Flood and Noah’s Ark (II).
This post continues implementing my explanation in the Flood scenario in order to address objections raised by sfmatheson and beaglelady, and comment on Al Leo’s inspiring epigenetic hypothesis.
Let us now focus on the population of human persons living with Noah before the Flood. They were mostly (I will explain in a coming post why I do not say ‘all’) descendants from the primeval persons God created.
Regarding this creation I share BioLogos What we believe 10.:
“God created humans in biological continuity with all life on earth, but also as spiritual beings. God established a unique relationship with humanity by endowing us with his image and calling us to an elevated position within the created order.”
Whichever way you look at it, this cannot mean other than at a certain moment God transformed existing Homo sapiens animals into human persons, and that there was no biological discontinuity between the non-personal human animal before God’s intervention and the human person after God’s intervention.
If you accept that humans were created by God as spiritual beings and you don’t endorse Intelligent Design, you can’t help admitting that at a certain time of history there was a large number of non-personal human animals which were biologically indistinguishable from us in every way.
However it would be a fallacy to extrapolate this situation at the origins and state that today “it still could be so”: Today we are under the principle established in Genesis 9:5-6 i.e.: the foundation of law. Once again, before the first human persons were created there was no sense of law, none clamming for rights, and consequently no rights to assign. Therefore it is completely flawed to interpret my explanation as if I would claim that there was once a world where some humans were “intrinsically dehumanized”, and suggest I am denying personal rights to “others” who actually are persons. Once the first human persons are created, moral responsibility and law appear, and then the human body becomes the fully detectable empirical basis to assign rights and human dignity: Any creature exhibiting a human body should be considered not an “other” but a brother by everybody. And if you dispose of the human body as the basis for ascertaining personhood you will always be tempted to draw racist conclusions while meeting cases like Helen Keller, Australian Aborigines, or Fuegians.
As I explain in the Essay the intervention on the part of God is not something you can directly see and detect like you see the sun or hear the alarm clock of your mobile. However in such intervention there is not more “magic” than in the quantum nonlocality ruling the most elementary physical phenomena. God’s influence happened at the spiritual level and induced the awareness of moral responsibility and the sense of law, which led to the emergence of the civilizations.
Vestiges revealing sense of law we find at the origins of civilization about 3500 BC. That is the reason why I set the creation of the primeval human persons (‘Adam and Eve’ and likely some others) at this time. However I am ready to predate this divine intervention if one finds vestiges before. Such vestiges are lacking for the time being: Neanderthals have sense of fashion, but not sense of law. By the way chimps have sense of fashion as well!
My assumption is perfectly compatible with Al Leo’s epigenetic hypothesis about the Great Leap Forward (GLF) he postulates at about 40,000 BC. In my view the interest of introducing “epigenetic” factors here is not so much explaining a sudden improvement of the functioning of human brain, which Sy_Garte questions:
The epigenetic hypothesis rather suggests how deletion of intermediate varieties may have occurred through highly complex processes involving environmental changes, anatomical features, alteration of gene-expression-regulation, SNPs, quantum randomness, etc. I dare to insist in the message of my Essay: The main mechanism of evolution is not “selection” but “deletion”: natural selection is the remains of natural deletion. By the way, Darwin’s racist description of Fuegians might reveal that he didn’t realized what evolution is all about in the end, i.e.: A smart way to lay the groundwork for assigning rights by means of deletion of intermediate varieties.
Anyway in my view, if vestiges proving sense of law are lacking, genetic or epigenetic changes whatsoever would not suffice to prove that God created the primeval human persons at a certain time.
To the Flood scenario I am proposing one could still object:
What would have happened if some non-personal human animal coming from outside Mesopotamia had joined the community of human persons living here, that is, Noah and his contemporaries?
Well this is explained in Genesis 6:1-4, but this post has already got too long and so I postpone the discussion of this exciting question for a later one (which also clarifies why above I have written ‘mostly’ instead of ‘all’).