When I say the flood was anthropolgoically local I mean it only destroyed the people in one area, not all the people on the entire planet (other than those in the Ark).
Antiquities I:96-98.
(96) Noah, fearing that God would flood the earth every year, because he had sentenced mankind to destruction, offered burnt offerings and asked God to maintain the original order in the future and inflict such calamity no more, by which the whole race of living beings would run the risk of being destroyed; but [he asked God], having avenged the wicked, to spare those who survived because of their goodness and those who had been judged fit to escape the danger. (97) For [he said] they would be more unfortunate than those and condemned to worse evil, if they might not be absolutely safe from it but might be kept for another flood, when they, having learned1 of the terrible experience of the first destruction, would also suffer a second. (98) He beseeched him to accept his offer graciously and to harbour such wrath against the earth no more, in order that they, concentrating on farming it [i.e. the earth] and building cities, might have a happy life, and that they should lack none of the good things they enjoyed before the deluge; so that they would live unto a good old age and a length of life similar to that enjoyed by men previously.
Translation in Jonquière, Prayer in Josephus (2007). Jonquière’s commentary follows.
“However, in the light of Noah’s remark in the prayer, I think Josephus takes it that there were more survivors of the Flood, namely, honest people besides Noah, who were also judged fit to survive.” (1)
“Similarly, Josephus tells us that Noah asks God in his prayer that the people who were rescued may found cities and build up new lives” (2)
(1) Tessel Marina Jonquière, Prayer in Josephus (BRILL, 2007), 59.
(2) Tessel Marina Jonquière, Prayer in Josephus (BRILL, 2007), 60.
Gen 20-21: (pre-flood): “Adah bore Jabal, he was the ancestor of those who live in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the ancestor of all those who play the lyre and pipe.”
Note present tense.
Gen 15:19 (post-flood) speaks of Kenites in the time of Abraham. Biblical scholars say the name Kenites is derived from the name Cain.
Numbers 24:22, Judges 1:16, 4:11, 4:17, 5:24, 1 Samuel 15:6, 27:10, 30:29, 1 Chronicles 2:55 all reference the Kenites more.
2)I hadn’t heard of them, though their Wikipedia page is fascinating reading. However I very much doubt that they have maintained complete genetic separation for millions from surrounding populations for the past thousand years.
Remind me again what is special about the Nephilim? They are only mentioned two or perhaps three times in the Bible, very inconsequentially.
They’re only mentioned twice, and in both contexts they’re depicted as mighty warriors. In Genesis 6 they are mentioned as existing before and after the flood, and in Numbers they are cited as the ancestors of the Anakim (an ethnic group of very tall Canaanites).
Answering your question could end up being like answering this question:
Today you are able to read.
When you were born you could not read.
Consequently there must have been a first day that you could read.
Can you identify any such singular day?
… or … Grown humans know the difference between good and evil
As babies they do not.
So identify that clear first day in a person’s life when they become accountable.
Some things defy our humanly-attempted, clean distinctions. The distinction may indeed exist (known to God), but it might be unreasonable for us to identify it. So not everything obeys the logic of the excluded middle that we want to enforce upon it. Human populations (as scientifically described) might be one of those areas.
The video “There was no first human” you refer to is an excellent presentation of a brilliant thought-experiment by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Magic of Reality”, and in a corresponding video: I quote both in my articles and my video on “Original sin”.
In fact it was Dawkin’s thought experiment, together with the conversations with Richard Durbin and Mark Thomas, which prepared my mind for the sudden insight I had in Down House on September 14th, 2016, and elaborated later in my Essay:
Species originate by means of natural deletion.
It is biologically impossible to establish the time when the species Homo sapiens begins.
Let me also say that Richard Dawkins is always for me a source of inspiration: Although he loudly insists to be an atheist, when you look attentively at what he claims you realize that he is strengthening the proofs of God’s existence after all (for an example see this video).
Having said that, the video “There was no first human” you link uses a subtle but big fallacy, which consists in constructing a paradox with the three following claims:
Claim 1: Every single human generation belongs to the same human species as its parents and as its children.
Claim 2: However going back 185 million generations, you find that your very distant grandfather was a fish.
Claim 3: Nonetheless it is biologically impossible to establish when the human species Homo sapiens begins, and consequently there was no first human person.
The fallacy consists in assuming that Claim 1 is a “principle of science” that holds for all animal species. Actually it holds only for the human species as it appears today, and it is not founded on science alone. From a strict biological perspective the concept of species is “useful nonsense” (as Thomas Mark provocatively says): When we use it, we are extrapolating from humans to animals. And for humans Claim 1 is a moral and legal principle, eminently important for assigning rights. It derives from the foundation of law: the observable basis for assigning rights is the human body; and we can unambiguously establish which body is a specific human one thanks the big gap Evolution has produced between us and non-human animals (see my Essay).
In fact, species didn’t evolve into other species: Life evolved by incredibly tiny leaps and “magical disappearance of intermediate varieties” into the sharply separate human species we know today: Until Homo sapiens personalis no group of animals is properly a “species”, and the use of this term is rather arbitrary.
Therefore, from a biological point of view it is true: There never was a first Homo sapiens, as there never was a first Chimp. By contrast there was a first human person or a primeval community of human persons, that is, humans with sense of law and capable to sin.
And how do you establish the time when these primeval human persons appeared on earth?
This time is undoubtedly well-known to God.
However in this respect you can read God’s mind by finding vestiges that reveal sense of law, and therefore capability to sin.
This is a very good point:
If you admit that divine intervention is not sort of biological engineering (Intelligent Design), then you can’t help admitting that way back then there were non-personal Homo sapiens animals, which were indistinguishable from us in every observable biological way. But (as I have repeatedly said) this do not allow you to think that today “going to Houston you may run into non-personal human animals” [quote from a beaglelady’s joke].
Does Genesis support the label “Homo sapiens animals”?
I think YES, in Genesis 2:7:
“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
The same term ‘living nefesh’ (‘living creature’) in the immediate context of Genesis refers clearly and repeatedly to non-human animals: these and ‘Adam’ are made from the dust of the ground, and are each a ‘living nefesh’. “It is not man’s possession of ‘the breath of life’ or his status as a ‘living creature’ that differentiates him from the animals”. [Wenham, G.J. p. 102]. Thus Genesis 2:7 can be read in correspondence to the gradual appearance of the species Homo sapiens in Africa about 500,000 years ago.
And you may still ask: How did the human ‘living nefesh’ (Homo sapiens animal) become a human person (Homo sapiens personalis)?
Well at a certain moment God endowed the Homo sapiens animals with sense of law. This happened at the spiritual level through some influence coming from outside space-time without any observable biological discontinuity. This is what Genesis 2:16-17, and Genesis 1:26-27 describe in marvelous terms.
The issue with the (spiritual) “immortal soul” is crucial to account for Jesus Christ “fully God and fully man” [Biologos, What we Believe, 4. I can elaborate on this in another post if you wish, or you read my article]. However, for the question we are debating here is not that crucial.
Here it is enough to acknowledge that: “God created humans in biological continuity with all life on earth, but also as spiritual beings.” [Biologos, What we Believe, 10.] This is the same as stating that human persons are incarnated immortal spirits.
And now I dare ask: Is it the problem that you feel you have to deny that we are called to have eternal life?
By the way ‘souls’, like angels and God Himself, head all directions: they all act from outside space-time, very much the same as quantum nonlocal influences do.
Thanks to you as well, and to all participating in this high quality debate, which is helping us to understand the Bible more in depth thanks Evolution.
Antoine, you may be right about not resorting to method one. I don’t know that much about Anthropology or what ever sciences are involved in your theory to claim you are trying to deny established scientific facts. There is a lot we don’t know about early humans. It was just that because when you affirmed all humans perished in the flood. I thought you could not be type two.
The point I wanted to make was in regard to your statement that you sought to integrate the “Truth of Revelation” with the “Truth of Science”. If by the Truth of Revelation, you meant the main message of the Bible. And if we changed the "Truth of Science’ to facts of science. Then I would say that it would not be concordism. Your theory,however, tries to get the facts of a Bible story to agree with the facts of science. To me this is exactly what concordism is. A better solution would be to admit they just don’t agree and not try to come up with strained theories to make them agree.
As to your challenge question. I like what beaglelady, Mervin, and Dennis have said. I don’t think you can point to a particular in time where you can say, yesterday there were no humans today there are.
@sfmatheson, I think I can get a grip on what @AntoineSuarez is trying to say. But the way he is saying it is certain to get him into a bar fight with molecular biologists some day!
If you are going to wrap your arms around a population over the span of centuries or eons, it is the same kind of problem face by those who steady Ring Species.
Individually, each population appears compatible with its neighboring population. It’s only when you compare the two terminal populations that we run into definitional troubles!
When the researcher is spanning time instead of geographical barriers the same problem can emerge. It’s only when the middle populations are eliminated that clarity is obtained:
If the Midwest Rabbits were to be wiped out tomorrow, we would have a clear case of two remaining populations (reproductively incompatible) who represent two species. If we bring back the Midwestern rabbit … have we changed this conclusion? Depending on your definitions, you haven’t changed anything. But as long as there are intermediate populations, genetic exchange can theoretically still happen between the Terminal Populations.
Conclusion?: Keep the definitions of Species relevant to the context! You can’t go into any bar of scientists and say that there is no species distinctions between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens. That’s just asking for troubles!
But some of us will know what you are trying to say. But you would be saying it badly.
We’ve all noted (or read someone who has noted), at one time or another, that just because modern alligators look like alligators from 20 million years ago, doesn’t mean they should be considered the same species.
But there was a time in natural philosophy where “appearance” was all we had to hang our hat on!
The Wiki article on Ernst Mayr is instructive in this point:
"Although Charles Darwin and others posited that multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor, the mechanism by which this occurred was not understood, creating the species problem. Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for species. In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, "
This is pretty sexy thinking considering the discovery of DNA’s molecular structure was a decade away, right ?!?
As I have mentioned in another thread, the real irony here is that Mayr introduced reproductive compatibility as a litmus test for differentiating species - - which brings us full circle back to the Biblical understanding of “kinds”: animal “kinds” are those groups that can “produce” a new generation! What’s the test for a “kind”? Not an animal’s appearance… but its ability to produce “its own kind”.
While some flippant critics sometimes emphasize how poorly this kind of definition works in some situations, imagine how badly a definition based on Appearances worked!
Obviously the limitation to this definition of reproductive compatibility is that it pretty much doesn’t allow for testing modern populations against fossilized dead ones.
I dunno. It’s a discussion forum. I think the forum currently has several voices of knowledgeable experts who can and should watch for examples (like the latest one in this thread) of falsehood or significant error. A “content editor” would be nice but runs the risk of making the discussion look curated or controlled. Maybe another idea is for readers to be able to flag a post for the attention of “official” participants like @DennisVenema, so that a thread like this one (which I was ignoring due to its title) doesn’t turn into a place for irresponsible speculation couched in scientific (or theological) terms by a person who may seem credible at first glance.
I agree with your basic point, though, that accurate scientific writing anywhere, but especially at BL, is important enough that caveat lector is not a responsible position.
I have more and more the impression that we agree to a large extent, and it may be worth trying to ascertain in which points we deviate from each other.
I think we both agree that the Flood has been an actual historical event around 3000 BC, and that on the basis of the available data this event must have happened along the following scenario:
About 100,000 humans living around Noah in Sumer became destroyed by the Flood because of their sins,
and about 7,000,000 humans living far away from Noah spread all over the world remained untouched.
In case you don’t agree to some of these tenets please let me know in order we can found common ground for arguing.
Now I further assume that:
The 7,000,000 human living beings living far away were incapable of sinning and therefore were not in “need of Salvation”.
After the Flood these living beings were transformed by God into human persons capable of sinning and in “need of Salvation”.
The postdiluvian Nephilim were descendants of these humans capable of sinning created after the Flood.
From our debate in this Forum I am getting the feeling that the terms “global” and “local” are not appropriate to interpret 2 Peter 2:5. In fact the message this inspired writing conveys is twofold:
“The ancient world” was the world where all humans capable to sin lived.
All these people (except Noah and his family) were destroyed by the Flood.
In other words, the author of 2 Peter 2:5 is speaking from the “Salvation perspective” of the “Council of Jerusalem”. For him “people” was synonymous of “human beings capable of sinning”.
This “Salvation perspective” is clearly supported by 1 Peter 3:18-21, where it is stated that Jesus Christ after resurrecting went to deliver the imprisoned spirits who were “ungodly” in the days of Noah immediately after the Flood, but apparently repented from their sins before dying (as Peter did after his denial of Jesus!), and were awaiting Jesus’ Resurrection to go to heaven together with the Righteous of the Old Testament (Abel, Noah, Abraham etc.).
Theologically Thomas Aquinas S.Th. III, q.73, a.3 interprets 1 Peter 3:20-21 in the sense that “there is no entering into salvation outside the Church, just as in the time of the deluge there was none outside the Ark, which denotes the Church.”
In summary for the writer(s) of the Letters of Peter what matters is “people” who were in need of Salvation and capable of sinning. According to the parsimony principle one should then choose as explanation that the 7,000,000 living far away from Noah were not capable of sinning.
Regarding the Nephilim we seem to agree that with Genesis 6:4 the Yahwist is interested in stressing that after the Flood there were in earth people who were not descendants from the 8 in the Ark.
Nonetheless, in my opinion, the interpretation that the Nephilim “living on on earth afterward” were necessarily "people capable of sinning who survived the Flood” does not follow from Genesis 6:4. One can very well interpret, as I do, that such Nephilim were the descendants of “the sons of God” created after the Flood. I think to decide this question we should previously settle the interpretation of the term “sons of God” in Genesis 6: 2 and 4.
It’s important that you understand the “Catholic-Style” doctrine that @AntoineSuarez is relying upon!
I started a whole thread to discuss his scenario:
The former Pope (still breathing) started recent-times discussion of the idea … but I do not know if Antoine is saying that the retired Pope was the one to first formulate the idea in complete form … or if he merely picked up the burden to teach someone else’s idea from generations ago!
Antoine is now applying the idea (that was intended to apply even to Creationist interpretations of Post-Eden’s population) to the parallel problem of Biological Hominids being identical in all physical ways to the Hominid family that God adopted and “infused” with Moral understanding … making them humans as we now understand the term!
Hominids abound (by Creation or by Evolution).
God takes one, or one pair, and makes them Morally aware.
By contact, or by God’s intervention in all future hominids, all humanity becomes morally aware within a finite number of generations.
4) At some point, the first behavior of Sin occurs. This is probably not because of the holy behavior of the hominids, but because it takes moral awareness to be guilty of sinning. Once God triggered Moral Awareness in all hominids, only then can the first Sin occur.
God is confronted by the choice of “Saving” just the humans who have sinned (and ignoring the other non-sinners), or deciding if all humanities require the same treatment (whatever the treatment is).
God concludes that he cannot ignore the non-sinning humans, because they are not exposed to Moral Choice if he does ignore them.
God adds “The Original Sin” as part of their Soul for all humans born from now on.
God is then able to extend the same grace and salvation to all Humans.
Correlate Conclusion: Original Sin is not transmitted genetically (genetics are a part of the flesh/physiological side)… but because God intentionally Includes the nature of “Original Sin” in each human soul.
I think it is much simpler to set aside the Western doctrine of Original Sin. The Eastern Orthodox communities have done so for generations.
But what is fascinating about @AntoineSuarez’s approach is he has named the conduit for this Original Sin… it is the Soul… the Soul, with its “humanizing element” of Original Sin is being packaged together by God, and delivered to our fleshly expression of the soul in the “space-time” dimension… for our own good!
In his article he describes the human body as the material manifestation of our spiritual soul. A totally delicious idea.
For me, I see the human neo-cortex as the “physiological/neural” lense that focuses the Soul’s operations in a higher spatial plane, down into the mortal realm where it can be seen by flesh-based eyes and heard with flesh-based ears.
Actually the global population at around 3,000 BCE looks like it was probably around 12-14,000,000, but yeah most people were living outside the Mesopotamian region and yes I agree only those in the Mesopotamian flood basin were affected by the flood. There’s clear physical evidence for a Mesopotamian mega-flood at around 2,900 BCE.
The people living far away were capable of sinning insofar as they were morally aware. They had a sense of right and wrong, and they formed societies in which morality was prescribed. However, they were unenlightened as to God’s law, so sin was not imputed to them. They were not responsible to the law of God.
Consequently they had no need of being “transformed by God into human persons capable of sinning”. They were already human persons capable of sinning.
A natural reading of the Genesis account is that the Nephilm preceded and ante-ceded the flood; they were around “in those days” (the days before the flood), “and after”.
I think you’re making it a lot more complicated than it needs to be.
Just for clarity’s sake, let me summarize a key difference between your position and what it looks like is @AntoineSuarez’s position:
Jon, you propose 3 categories of hominids:
Those who had Moral Agency, and knew God’s law, and violated it.
Those who had Moral Agency, and didn’t know God’s law, and so were not “Sinners” in terms of God’s law, even though they could still act immorally, because even without awareness of God’s law, they had Moral Agency.
And the foggy implication that somewhere in the evolution of hominids, there were proto-humans, on the verge of having Moral Agency, who couldn’t sin against God’s law, or against Human law, because they had not yet developed (or been given) the insights of Moral Agency.
Antoine’s categories are more chronologically arranged:
Proto-human hominids achieve humanity, either because one group evolves to the stage of Moral Awareness, or is provided with Moral Awareness by God.
This Moral Awareness (or Moral Agency) spreads throughout the entire human population. And virtually all humanity successfully resists violating the Morality they have become aware of.
One kin group, associated with “Adam and Eve” as an historical couple or as a figurative representative of them, chooses to Sin against their Moral Awareness (while the rest of humanity (the Nephilim) continues not to.violate any of their Moral Awareness (with no differentiation between knowledge of God’s laws of their own devising).
Eventually God decides to wipe out most of the immoral humans, with the exception of Noah and his family, but he decides to add the ingredient of “Original Sin” to the souls of all those born (presumably those born after the flood?), whether they were related to Noah or not, so that he could treat all humans alike by his grace of Salvation.
Naturally, I could be misunderstanding one or the other viewpoints, but offer this compare/contrast to help see the differences…
At the BioLogos conference there was a presentation by Alexander Saleh that I thought you guys might find interesting, as it seems relevant to these Adam and Eve and moral agency discussions.
Saleh was not speaking directly to the issue of the Fall, but he was jumping off Walton’s framework of functional ontology and material ontology and incorporating some ideas of psychologist William Harvey.
The gist of the argument went something like this: We have traditionally seen the cosmos as a collection of objects. But if we look at the cosmos as a collection of functions, then the focus is redirected to the ordered systems, not the individual components and capacities of the systems. If the primary emphasis of Genesis is as Walton says on the functions of creation then it is not on the (material) components or individual capacities of those components. ‘Very good’ means ready to function in the system (capacity), but accountability doesn’t exist until capacity is activated and functions are actually performed.
Using Walton’s temple inauguration model, Saleh argued that functions were not activated until the seventh day, when God took up his rest (rule) in his cosmic temple. He claimed there are several implications: 1) The designation “very good” doesn’t exist until the cosmic temple is instituted by God. 2) the existence of functions (capacities) is not the same thing as activation/performance of functions (capacities).
I thought these ideas might be interesting for your discussion since it seems to me that people are usually conflating moral agency (capacity to function) with moral accountability (performance of function) and Saleh teased those two things apart in an interesting way. Personally I think that the capacity for moral reasoning and behavior is not one and the same as “the image of God,” which I see as a conferred function and role, not a “component” of humanity. Being morally capable in no way requires God to confer image bearing status on humanity. Their performance of a role/function in God’s cosmic temple was independent of their capacity to perform the role.
I don’t know if the powers that be are planning on making the recordings of the presentations available at some point, but if they do maybe you would be interested in that one. It was called “Function, Genesis, and the Philosophy of Biology.”
If you mean there’s a difference between moral agency and moral acts, I agree. And I am actually differentiating between moral agency and moral accountability. Humans are morally accountable to any laws of which they are aware. So they are not accountable to God’s laws until they are aware of them, but they are accountable to human laws of which they are aware.