I will admit that I haven’t followed the work being done. It just struck me as a possibility when I first heard.
But they are all good plot elements for a good story. That doesn’t make the story true.
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It may not make the story historical, but it may nonetheless be true.
The story contains Truth™ just not historical facts. Modern readers tend to equate truth to facts.
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.
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”.
Yes.
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?”.
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.
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.
This doesn’t require texts.
Thanks Jon for this comment.
In a previous posting you declared your agreement to my “Conclusion 2”:
Consider the population P of Homo sapiens to whom God had not yet revealed His law before the Flood like He revealed to Adam and Eve.
From your agreement above we are led to infer that:
- God revealed His law to this population P of Homo sapiens at the end of the Flood, and they became responsible to God’s law and capable of sinning against it,
and
- Since the end of the Flood all human beings living on earth (the Australian aboriginals included) are morally responsible to God’s law and capable of sinning against it.
But now in your last reply you claim:
In my view this claim contradicts your agreement above.
I would be thankful if you could clarify this point: This may help to establish which tenets we share and where the reason for possible differences lies, and so proceed with a useful discussion.
Additionally you state:
Evidence for trials and judgments would certainly prove sense of law.
However, if by “executions” you mean “prehistoric massacres”, then in my opinion they would not suffice to prove sense of law. So I would be thankful to know which concrete evidence you are referring to.
Have a blessed Good Friday and Easter!
If the Flood happened around 3000 BCE, Genesis 4:17 may very well refer to events that happened around 3500 BCE, and hence at the beginning of recorded history.
In this respect “archaeological or paleoanthropological relics” would be more relevant. Could you please tell us which concrete evidence do you have that “reveals sense of law before 6000 BCE”?
You are putting Adam only 500 years before the flood? Hard to do when Adam lived for 900+ years. Bishop Ussher places him more like 2500 years before the flood.
And if you want archaeological evidence I just read a news story about a village found in Canada that dates back to 14,000 BCE. And for humans to live together in groups large enough to be considered cities I believe they had to have some sense of law, or rules of conduct if you wish. There is probably paleoanthropological research that shows this but I don’t have any at hand.
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Let me flip this around. If humans had no sense of law what types of behavior would you expect? Cavemen clubbing their women and dragging them back to the cave by their hair? 
Survival of the fittest? Kill or be killed?
And you haven’t answered my question. Can humans live in a large group with no sense of law?
And that takes me back to Genesis 4
13 Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear.
14 Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.”
15 But the LORD said to him, “Not so ; anyone who kills Cain will suffer vengeance seven times over.” Then the LORD put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him. NIV
Wouldn’t a sense of punishment imply that Cain understood the consequences of breaking the law?
For the mark on Cain to work implies that the people who saw it knew the consequence of killing him and therefore they also had a sense of law?
I cannot imagine a human society where people have no sense of what is right, decent, and good, at least to one’s own tribe. Even social animals manage to live by unwritten rules.
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When in college, someone tried very hard to convince me that the Vikings-of-old were such a brutal people, it could be said they didn’t have a society that could be called a “civilization” … only a culture. A culture of blood libel, conquest and revenge.
I’m still trying to decide if that was possible…
You can still have a civilization no matter how horrible you are. Look at the Roman Empire. Civilization is simply the highest level of organization for humans.
Of course, the magic is in the definition. And my classmate was attempting to refine the definition the term “Civilization” to mean “lawful”. And he wanted to make the point that a society without any real laws, or judges, could be considered to be un-civilized - - at least, that’s what he was asserting.
But even if Vikings only had “kings”, or “chiefs”, I would hazard a guess that they imposed “their” rules… even if it was only oral law.
I’ve seen alternate treatments where some Native American tribes, having war band leaders rather than chiefs, punishment or judgement was based on each individual deciding on their own whether to participate in shunning or not. The point being asserted here was such a group (if it indeed ever existed), would be as close to theoretical anarchy as one might expect is possible.
In a more recent discussion of last year, the topic of “civilization” again came up … and a fellow blog participant insisted on a more classical definition: “Civilization is society based on at least a minority of its members being literate.”
Different kinds of definitions with different kinds of repercussions…
I took cultural anthropology many moons ago, and I recall that civilization has a precise meaning, even though others might use the term loosely. It’s the most complex form of organization. That doesn’t imply superiority, of course.
This French gal … she was clobbering me … I was using the term “civilization” in a fairly loose manner,
as in Definition #3 from Dictionary.com -
**noun **
3. “any type of culture, society, etc., of a specific place, time, or group: Greek civilization.”
But she insisted that was a terrible use of the word and that I needed to restrict its use to:
- "an advanced state of human society, in which a high level of culture, science, industry, and government has been reached. "
I guess I mis-remembered the nuance about literacy, because I don’t really see anything about that in the dictionary. Though it is likely her position was that if a nation/people were non-literate, how could they make a claim on “a high level of culture, science, etc.”.
Using the latter definition, she probably would have insisted that the Vikings were not a “civilization”, at least before they became the rulers of a third of the Western portion of the ancient known world!
In fact I am making a guesstimate on the basis of what the New Testament tells us: According to Luke 3:36-38 there are 8 generations from Adam to Noah.
The ages of the antediluvian patriarchs can be considered rather fictional, and in this respect a fitting reason is provided by Gordon Wenham, p.186: The precision of the characters conveys the notion that these patriarchs were real people, while their age scale represents their remoteness from the author of Genesis.
Also chimps, elephants, vampire bats manage very well to live in a large group with in-group behavioral rules. Nonetheless they neither have sense of law, nor free-will, nor do we consider them capable of sinning against God’s commandments. The hints of morality or proto-morality that we do find in non-human species clearly suggest that there is a natural process by which God brought about the cognitive capacities necessary for developing the sense of law and moral responsibility.
I suppose you are referring to the village found in Triquet Island (British Columbia). As you very well suggest, the humans living there had certainly rules of conduct or sort of proto-morality. But this does not mean they were aware of responsibility to God’s law and capable of sinning. Apparently they had developed sophisticated tools, but to my knowledge signs of worship have not been found so far, not even signs of proto-religious awareness.
Additionally, the date of 14,000 BCE is largely before writing appears in Mesopotamia. The importance of writing for ascertaining the time when the first human persons were created by God is also supported by the fact that monogamous marriage was a primeval God’s commandment, as Jesus Christ himself teaches us (Matthew 19: 3-9 and Mark 10:1-12). And some form of writing is needed to register who is married to whom.
Cain had undoubtedly sense of law, and was aware of his responsibility to God’s law and his capability of sinning. According to my theory Cain and his descendants can be considered part of the population living in Sumer, the region which later became submerged by the Flood.
The story with the mark is highly relevant: The people living in Mesopotamia who saw Cain, had also sense of law and knew the consequence of killing him. Nonetheless astonishingly God does not proclaim here the principle of Genesis 9: 5-6: “And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being…for in the image of God has God made mankind.” Why?
According to my theory the reason is that such a universal principle could fittingly be proclaimed only after the 14,000,000 humans living outside Mesopotamia spread all over the world were endowed with free-will by God and thereby became persons capable of sinning and in the stage of need of Salvation. Genesis 9: 3-6 is telling us that this happened at the end of the Flood.
OK so you are throwing out Genesis as a historical document correct? And the NT references to the OT as history?
But humans do have free will which is where the requirement for some set of agreed to behaviors comes in when you are talking about large numbers of people living together.
So now morality is a natural process. I guess God just poofed this into existence for the humans outside the scope of the non-historical local flood? Not to say that He couldn’t do it of course.
First, animals that mate for life don’t need any form of writing so why should humans?
Second, dna studies have show humans have been largely monogamous for a very, very long time. So I guess writing is not required for humans.
And yet according to Genesis 9:6 Cain should have been put to death. So Cain had the sense of a law that didn’t exist yet?
Or perhapes the writer was telling a story that contains a message and the fact that there were people outside the scope of the flood didn’t matter.
The Roman Catholic Church, @AntoineSuarez’s mother communion long ago adopted a more nuanced interpretation of the Scriptures in the face of the obvious facts presented to human witness - - the Earth being quite old and the reality of Speciation unavoidable.
So, there has been a massive pivot within Christianity, where the Vatican has become a bulwark in the defense of scientific wisdom, while the vast sections of Protestants who have had a long-standing animus against the Catholic Church have inherited the mantle of the desire to suppress some categories of human investigation and wisdom.
Why does it appear to you to be a contradiction? Remember, I don’t believe in Original Sin.
Thanks Bill_II for your comments. To begin with I answer the following one, which is particularly interesting:
If I understand well you argue along this line:
Since humans have free-will,
a large number of humans living together
requires some set of agreed behaviors.
By contrast, vampire bats don’t have free-will,
so a large numbers of bats living together
doesn’t require some set of agreed behaviors.
(Please correct the preceding statements if I have misinterpreted you).
Now my question is:
How can you establish that humans do have free-will
and
vampire bats don’t have free-will?
My main concern is precisely to define which evidence allows us to establish that humans do have free will, whereas non-human animals don’t have it, and thereby found a clear distinction between humanity and other animals living forms.
If one says: “humans have free will because large numbers of people live together according to some set of agreed behaviors”, one would beg the question.
So my reasoning is:
Laws and trials prove that humanity is called to live and develop according to moral rules and a set of agreed behaviors.
There is no evidence that animals have laws and trials.
From this I conclude that humans have free-will, whereas non-humans don’t have it.
Since the beginning of humanity cannot be established by biological means whatsoever, I further conclude that God created humans endowed with free-will at the time when vestiges revealing sense of law are dated, that is, about 3,500 BC (the beginning of writing in Sumer). And on the basis of Genesis 9: 3-6, I finally conclude that at the end of the Flood all humans became endowed with free will and sense of law.
I dare to insist: What is at stake is to have a clear basis for distinguishing humans from animals. This is a serious issue and if we don’t achieve to reach agreement on this, we can give up our common effort of defending our Christian faith against atheism.
So please, if you don’t agree to my reasoning above tell us which evidence you advance for claiming that “humans do have free will”.