Since numerous animal species exhibit social behavior I would be thankful to know which is the particular evidence for your claim.
This may allow us to discuss your objection appropriately.
Certainly Bill!
But your argument also applies to our 185 millionth great grandfathers, which were fishes. Should we then assume that they may have been endowed by God with sense of law and were capable of sinning? Where would you draw the line?
Yes. It’s the only way we can live together in peace.
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We can start with the Australian aboriginals, who have lived in Australia for around 40,000 years. During that time they developed their own social laws long before they had contact with any other social group, and they never even developed a writing system.
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Sometime before 3500 BCE and sometime after the fishes. Exactly when is not recorded in the Bible so I assume it is not important for us to know. Since non-Biblical sources would place it before 3500 BCE I think we can safely assume it did happen at some point before then.
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Good. I don’t care for this kind of division.
Excellent Bill!
I have the feeling you are getting really closer to my position:
One could even go back to “sometime before fishes”, actually till the Big-Bang.
So in the end your position is: “Sometime before 3500 BCE and sometime after the Big-Bang”.
And this is my position as well.
Now if you admit that the creation of the primeval human persons and the Fall could have been “at 3500 BCE or some point before then”, then you are obliged to explain how this hypothesis fits with the consequences of the Fall, you cannot simply cope out saying “it is not recorded in the Bible”. On the other hand the hard task is precisely to show that the Fall could have happened at 3500 BCE, when Homo sapiens already had a population of more than 7 million. And this is the task I tackle, and propose an explanation that fits with Scripture, BioLogos, the Council of Trent, and the Papal Magisterium.
Regarding the Flood things are a bit more complicated because on the basis of the Bible narrative you can locate this event at about 3000 BCE, and the Epistles of Peter insist that “only 8 people of the ancient world were saved”. These data are recorded in the Bible, so you cannot claim “it is not important for us to know”. This is the reason why I have developed my theory about the Flood, which fits with Science, Scripture, and furthermore is testable.
Sorry, we are no ways near close.
Actually I am under no such obligation. You have to accept a fallible human interpretation of Genesis 3 to even get to “the fall”. So to me it is still not recorded in the Bible. No where in Scripture does it say we can trust a human interpretation to be infallible.
You are applying your Western way of thinking to Peter and making the mistake of thinking he must have meant 8 and only 8 people were saved. The message is not that exactly 8 and only 8 people were saved. So in effect you are trying to add to the data that is recorded in the Bible to get it to fit your version of history. Which to me means this is not something that is important to us to know.
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I think @AntoineSuarez has been pretty careful about what he is writing. He says 8 were saved, and all the rest of humanity that didn’t need saving, had offspring with a new kind of Soul … a soul injected by God with original sin. Souls come from God… and the Original Sin that makes God’s intervention necessary is provided by God as well.
How exactly do you see your scenario as differing from 8 people on a boat (in a regional flood)… and multitudes of other people, elsewhere, not being harmed by the flood at all?
This issue has been already discussed in the comments to my Essay. I first summarize here my answers and thereafter elaborate a bit further with pleasure.
We have to distinguish between two different questions:
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?
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?
As argued in my Essay and previous postings:
The answer to Question 1 is: Vestiges revealing sense of law.
The answer to Question 2 is: The living human body.
It would be a fallacy to confuse these questions and answers, and
take the answer to Question 1 for the answer to Question 2,
or vice versa
the answer to Question 2 for the answer to Question 1.
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.
Regarding Australian aboriginals:
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.
On the other hand, the fact that groups of human persons today cannot write does not suffice to conclude that time T can be established by means other than vestiges revealing sense of law. 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.
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. The reason is that such writings express the conviction that laws are uniform and specific guidelines, and also an idea that laws are somehow immutable, and for humanity from above humanity. Such texts seem to say: “it doesn’t matter what your caste is, what your place in society is, this is the law.” Actually, the very fact of enacting laws can already be considered a proof of God’s existence.
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”.
In conclusion: As a quantum physicist I have long experience in proving myself wrong, and discovering thereafter that the new results strengthen the reasons to believe in God [see this Nature]. So I am the first interested in trying to demolish my theory about the Flood. But regarding “Australian aboriginals”, I can’t help stating that they rather seem to support it.
Nonetheless Jon, we should all try continuing the effort of testing this theory seriously, and I am thankful to you for this. The reason is that if my theory prevails, then we would have a magnificent testimony by Nature of the divine inspiration of Scripture.
Instead of looking for a sense of law why don’t you look for a sense of an after life? To me that marks the beginning of modern man.
I find it ironic that except for 3 or 4 sentences, the Old Testament is devoid of a sense of the afterlife.
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I was going to pop off with “Until Christ there wasn’t any reason to be worried about the afterlife”, but that isn’t quite right. I agree that the OT is strangely silent on the subject. You would think after spending all that time in Egypt the Hebrews would have a well developed sense of an afterlife.
Correct. And at best it was a shadowy existence. Most modern Jews don’t believe in an afterlife.
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Your observation is one of the best reasons I don’t even think Exodus is literally true. Anybody who spent a century or more in Egypt, and especially if they are supposed to be the progenitors of an Afterlife Salvation Cultus, would be expected to be zealous about embracing the Egyptian view of an afterlife, where the soul is judged, and there is even a lake of fire! But the lake of fire is not used to punish the wicked. No, you are eaten by a god who has the head of an Alligator (type-casting is so cruel!).
Even the Greeks were so influenced by the Egyptian view of some kind of an afterlife!
So what is going on in the Old Testament? Where is a widespread acknowledgment of a General Resurrection? Where are the streets of gold? And so forth…
The Sadducees were Jews too, right? I would suggest the Sadducees are the more authentic representation of what Judaism was like before Zoroastrianism (with its angels, dualism of good vs. evil, and an afterlife in the sky, not in the underworld) started to turn ordinary Canaanites into Messianic Jews!
We see the emerging conflict right in the New Testament, but we have avoided making any important deductions about this divergence.
Thanks George for this timely clarification.
To avoid possible misinterpretations I would like to insist that the stage of “Original Sin” is actually nothing other than “to be in need of Redemption”, or more precisely “to be in need of Jesus Christ’s Grace to reach Salvation”.
The primeval human persons (say “Adam and Eve”) before the Fall were not in “need of Redemption”, that is, they were not in “stage of Original Sin”. After transgressing God’s law they caste themselves into the same stage as fallen angels.
God could very well have decided to act according to (Matthew 25:41), that is, remove those sinners from the face of the earth, send them “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels”, and create new humans on earth in stage of innocence. New sinners had been removed from the earth again and again, and this way the earth could have gone on being populated by “holy people” till the end of times.
Nonetheless God preferred to have mercy of human sinners of all times. To this aim He agreed that the first sinners and all sinners thereafter remain in the earth, to the sake of moving them to repent, without violating their free will, through the Grace of Jesus Christ. This way the earth should be a home for “sinners in need of Redemption”.
But having decided this, God had a problem: Familiar with [Biologos, What we Believe, 10.], He knew that humans were to be created as spiritual beings; but in which stage should He create the new human persons to be generated till the end of times? Should He create them like He created Adam and Eve, that is, “not-being in need of Redemption”? After some reflection God saw that this would not be convenient at all: Having on earth two different groups of people, one of people “being in need of Redemption” (sinners) and another of people “not-being in need of Redemption” would be counterproductive for His work of Redemption. For understanding the reasons “why God excluded” the coexistence of these two groups, further studies are surely needed, but “that God excluded” this possibility, this we know because He inspired Paul to write Romans 11:32. In conclusion, after the first sin God decided to create any new human person in the stage of “being in need of Redemption” (also called stage of “Original sin”).
The statement “God provides the original sin” could be misinterpreted in the sense that “God induces some damage in the new persons or ‘souls’ he creates”. I prefer to say “God creates the new persons (or new spiritual souls) as being in need of Redemption”. Thereby one makes clear that although this stage is worse than the stage in which Adam and Eve were created, it is a positive and encouraging situation after all, precisely because it makes Redemption possible for all sinners till the end of times, who otherwise had been “damned to eternal fire”. In fact the time itself is already an ingredient of God’s Redemption plan: the fallen angels could not be redeemed because their decision happened at once. Because of the “stage of Original sin” (that is, the prospect of Redemption) Adam’s sin can even be called "felix culpa”.
(happy fault).
This sheds also an interesting light on evolution:
The same way that God could have decided to remove the sinners from the world, He had also the power to keep the earth as a Paradise. He could have avoid a lot about evolution that’s not so pretty, like many painful forms of natural selection, illnesses, death, extinction; and instead of creating “through such a tortuous and suffering-filled process”, he could have created [following Jerry Coyne’s suggestion] “just poofing everything into being at once, as Genesis says.” This way the earth would always have been populated by “godly” people living in the “perfect” Paradise. The “perfect pre-fall world” of YECs could very well have been the “perfect post-fall world” as well.
But having decided to redeem the sinners, God had to conceive a world which is appropriate for sinners to live. Such is the evolutionary world, where on the one hand “we can clearly see God’s eternal power and divine nature”, but on the other hand we also experience some unpleasant things like illness, pain, death, catastrophes, moral evil, etc. And why can these unpleasant world’s properties be good for our Redemption? This again deserves further study, but it seems obvious to me that such properties lead us to realize that “we are not like God”, and this way help us not to fall into the temptation angels and “Adam and Eve” fell.
Paradoxically the “perfect pre-fall world” YECs invoke would have been the consequence of “God’s Judgement” with immediate condemnation of sinners after the Fall. The “imperfect” evolutionary world which we live in is rather the result of God’s mercy in preview of the Fall.
This leads straightforwardly to my theory about the Flood:
2 Peter 2:5, and 1 Peter 3:20 insist that “a few people, eight in all, were saved through water”. Reading this verse in the perspective of “Salvation for the whole humanity” as established in the Council of Jerusalem (49 AD) I interpret this pericope as referring to the population who was “in need of Salvation”, that is the 100,000 living in Sumer around Noah. By contrast the 14,000,000 humans living outside Mesopotamia were not responsible to God’s law and capable of sinning: they were neither in the stage of “Adam and Eve” before the Fall nor in “need of salvation”, and thus are not relevant for what the inspired author is interested to transmit us.
As George very well remarks, after the Flood God endowed these 14,000,000 living beings spread all over the world with sense of law and they became capable of sinning against God’s law; and as argued before, these new human persons were created by God in the stage of “need of Redemption” (in George’s wording: God gave the 14,000,000 Homo sapiens outside Mesopotamia “a new kind of soul” and new persons became generated “in the stage of Original Sin”).
Bill_II objects to my interpretation of Peter’s Letters:
Accordingly, Bill_II seems to endorse an alternative account along this line:
If one reads 1 Peter 3:20 appropriately “applying Eastern way of thinking”, then “a few people, eight in all” should be interpreted as meaning: “14,000,000 people who lived outside Mesopotamia spread all over the world, shared sense of law, and were in need of Redemption.”
Independently of the fact that it is baffling how an inspired author, even using huge “Eastern imagination”, can describe a population of 14,000,000 by “a few people, eight in all”, the two accounts can be tested against each other: According to my account vestiges revealing sense of law can appear in the world outside Mesopotamia only after the Flood, while according to Bill_II’s account they should appear long before the Flood.
In any case I would be thankful if participants to this debate express their opinion about these two alternative interpretations of 1 Peter 3:20.
Given I have never stated my opinion it is needless to say you have me all wrong. I don’t know why you try to put into words what other people might be thinking.
I consider Genesis 1-11 to be stories, along the lines of the Bible stories we tell young children, that are only meant to tell us about the character of God. There is nothing in these chapters that I would consider literal history.
You want to base your theory on “Vestiges revealing sense of law” and base this on writings which would only exist after the development of written languages. Hence your date coincides with the beginning of recorded history. However, there is another indicator of a sense of law that you don’t mention. For humans to live in groups that are larger than family size there must be a shared set of “laws” that regulate behavior. These don’t have to be written down and probably depended on the development of a spoken language before or at the same time of their beginning. Now, without referring to archeology or paleoanthropology when did humans begin living in cities?
The answer is in Genesis 4:17 “Cain made love to his wife, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Enoch. Cain was then building a city, and he named it after his son Enoch.” NIV
So you have your “Vestiges revealing sense of law” long before recorded history and long before the flood. If you want to bring in archeology or paleoanthropology then that pushes it back to well before 6000 BCE.
As regards The Flood, I believe this is a retelling of an actual event that would have actually looked like a global flood, the filling of the Black Sea from the Mediterranean when the Bosphorus strait was breached.
You don’t really need to specify which regional flood, if you don’t have an explanation for why it took Noah a year to reach land while floating on the brand new Black Sea.
If you use the same explanations as other “Regional Flood” enthusiasts, throwing in the bit about the Black Sea, which happened thousands of years before the foundation of Sumeria, hurts the credibility of your general thesis.
Black Sea deluge is dated to around 5600 BCE and what I found for Sumeria was 5400 BCE so that is pretty much in the same ballpark. Never said I believed in a Regional Flood. Just the retelling of an earlier story with the details changed to fit what the writer was trying to say. Such as floating around for a year.
A close examination of the complexities displayed in Figure 15 shows that peat formation goes back more than 9000 years to 10,000 years ago (from the current surface elevation down to a little less than 50 meters). At this near 50m level, there isn’t any peat formation until well into the glacial period, some 21,000 years ago. The gap between the black line at 100m down (at 15,000 years) and rapid curve up to 0m down (at 9000 years) shows that the flooding didn’t start until 9000 years ago.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0025322716302961
Anastasia G. , Ryan W., McManus J. , Dimitrov P. , Dimitrov D., Slavova K., Filipova-Marinova M. (2016-2017), Compilation of geophysical, geochronological, and geochemical evidence indicates a rapid Mediterranean-derived submergence of the Black Sea’s shelf and subsequent substantial salinification in the early Holocene, Marine Geology. Vol. 383, 14-34.
The reason people want to believe the Black Sea Deluge occurred as recently as 5600 BCE is so they can corroborate the Ark story - - which, in reality, is no more corroborated than the more ordinary massive flooding in Mesopotamia. Why do I say that?:
Whether it be a Mesop. Flood, or a Black Sea Flood, the following logic still applies:
a) It would not take a year to find dry land;
b) It would not take a year for birds to find dry land;
c) It would not be necessary to stockpile animals and get on a boat, because “Hey, look behind you, higher ground!”
d) Any animals on the boat would have been part of a cargo to be delivered, not in anticipation of intentionally moving into the flooding waters, to stave off months of hunger;
e) There would have been no intrinsic logic of preserving mankind, as Noah stepped off the boat to be greeted by bewildered villagers, living at higher levels, asking: “Noah, didn’t you see us waving at you? We had barbecue and everything!”
The entire Flood story, from God’s early warnings, to the ark’s amazing dimensions, to its extended voyage, and the resulting survival of only one family, are all plot elements incompatible with any regional flood.
A massive flood story plotline can be inspired by a less massive flood. But none of the elements we actually find in the story of Noah is consistent with a “less massive flood”. And this is true whether it is an ANE regional flood or a Black Sea regional flood.
The story only makes sense if it was intended to mean a global deluge.
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