I guess I don’t see the issue? The God of the Old Testament frequently decides one group or another must have disaster inflicted upon them.
As for the Nephilim, there seem to be two interpretations: one, children of angels and humans, or two, children of the holy lineage of Adam (as in, Jesus traces his lineage back to Adam son of God) and the rest of the people on the earth. I lean towards the second, implying merely that one tribe was rather taller than another, though I haven’t researched it enough for any firm conclusion.
Of course, there was also the study talked about here that indicates mathematically that anybody alive that long ago is either the ancestor of all of us or none of us, which means it’s not a particularly impactive question for us to wonder about in terms of who’s descended from whom.
That would require something like 200 generations of people in a row only having sex with people their parents allowed them to. Continuous generations, and a community large enough to avoid getting horribly inbred makes it even more unlikely. Even one rebel is all it takes to mix up bloodlines!
Can I interest you in some swampland in Florida?
But I don’t really understand what you mean by ‘impeached,’ either. Are you describing Noah’s family as impeached by God? That’s a new one on me.
Plus, Nephilim would hardly be the only humans outside of the flood zone.
Thanks tomr for addressing the basic question of “defining human”.
I neither “resort to method one” nor “redefine the word human”.
I try to define the word human well.
Actually many of the so called “conflicts” between Bible and Science originate from ill-defined words.
You seem to claim you can sharply define through scientific facts the concept ‘human’.
So I challenge you to answer the following question:
Humans now exist.
However humans didn’t always exist.
Consequently there must have been a first human.
Can you tell us when and how did this “first human” come into existence?
“People now speak modern English. However, people didn’t always speak modern English. Consequently there must have been the first speaker of modern English.”
and it should become clear that this was achieved as a population, incrementally.
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.