Peter, Paul, and Luke contradict science

Which ‘scientists’? This is not scientifically possible by any definition of scientifically or possible; it is perfectly scientifically impossible. Evolution is a scientific, rational fact. That’s the scientific summary.

Let alone theological.

What has this silly fantasy got to do with the gospel?

Evolution is a scientific, rational fact. That’s the scientific summary.

So you didn’t read what you were supposed to read! Swamidass accepts evolution.

Swamidass is a scientist. Here’s a blog on Nature that says it’s ultimately a perfectly scientifically possible hypothesis.

This is not scientifically possible by any definition of scientifically or possible

It seems you have a dog in the race. What’s wrong with the genealogical verified possibility?

I’ve read everything I need to read thank you very much. The blog is not on the prestigious journal Nature, it could not be, it cannot be, it never will be. There is nothing even hypothetically scientific about Adam and Eve. There is no race, no competition, I need no dog. Swamidass does not accept evolution. Period. He believes in magic. Which has nothing whatsoever to do with the good news in Christ.

It gets confusing, but my impression that saying the GAE (genealogical Adam and Eve) is a scientifically possible scenario is a bit of a mischaracterization. Science cannot address it. It should be said that the GAE cannot be falsified scientifically. Also, while I hesitate to speak for Dr. Swadimass, it is safe to say he accepts evolutionary science, but allows for the possibility of something outside of it as a greater truth.

Aye Phil. Science does not need to address it. Science completely pre-empts it. If Dr. Swamidass accepts evolution, it should end there. The only rational allowance is for God as the ground of eternal, infinite being. And that is only predicated on the gospel. There is no confusion.

God didn’t do frequency matching six thousand and twenty three years ago, synchronizing the music on the evolution station and then swamping it with his own play list. That is not a greater truth. It is a deception. As used by Britain against Germany. And Argentina.

God does not lie.

I’m assuming your comment is ironic, and will address it accordingly.

No one is claiming that science provides evidence in favor of a genealogical Adam and Eve, AFAIK. Certainly I am not. In fact, most of the humans alive in 6000 BCE could be regarded as genealogical ancestors of all of us today.

The genealogical A&E claim is much narrower: there is no scientific evidence against a relatively recent genealogical A&E. However, there is extremely strong scientific evidence against a sole genetic ancestral couple anytime in the past 700k years (when a Neanderthal/Denisovan ancestral population split from the Sapiens population).*

This is why many Christian scientists make allowance for a relatively recent genealogical A&E even as they disagree with a genetic A&E.

Hope this adds some clarity to the discussion.

Best,
Chris

*Some do not think the split (accompanied by subsequent, occasional intermingling) should be regarded as significant, and they argue that a single couple as little as 400k years ago could have (theoretically) survived an extinction event and thus became sole ancestors of all humans. Under any scenario, however, scientific evidence is overwhelming against a sole genetic ancestral couple any less than 400kya.

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You clearly do not know our friend Joshua @Swamidass. He has invested a tremendous amount of time, energy, virtual ink, and (recently) paper and ink in the project of helping theologically conservative Christians accept the science of evolution. You could search any of the posts Joshua made in the 2015-2018 time frame on this very forum for proof.

Your assertion is not helping build your credibility with me, and I suspect with many other forum participants. I hope you will re-consider what you said.

Best,
Chris Falter

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The lack of credibility is entirely in pretending that Adam and Eve can be accommodated by science.

Nothing whatsoever about the gospel of universal salvation in Christ requires such nonsense.

Gabe,

You are right–there is a conflict. First of all, “science” does not say anything. Scientists do. So the conflict is between a biblical worldview and the naturalistic worldview, not between the Bible and science. The Bible, properly understood, and the evidence of science, also properly understood, are not in conflict.

The Bible does say there was a worldwide flood. And attempts to render it as a “local” event are pretty lame. So if there was never a worldwide flood, then the Bible is false, and could not be God’s Word. But there is significant evidence for such a flood. If there really was a worldwide flood, what would the evidence be? Millions of dead things, buried in rock layers, laid down by water, all over the earth.

70% of the continents are covered with sedimentary rock layers. Some of these layers are continent wide. The prevailing view is that these were laid down over millions of years as the continents sunk and were covered by oceans, then lifted, then sunk again. And somehow, fossils formed. But how are fossils made? Fossils are formed by rapid catastrophic burial, and hardly ever today, and not by being slowly covered over multiple years. Both Biblical and deep time geologists have the same evidence. Their understanding of the evidence is impacted by their worldview.

Gabe, there is a lot more to be said about this, and you will hear many reasonable sounding arguments and “academic” sounding arguments against this view. But there are many books available and hundreds of articles on line that support a biblical worldview for geology and the flood of Noah’s day that make a lot of sense and answer these arguments. You should give good consideration to their evidence. I have particularly enjoyed the books by Michael J Oard. Actually, his Mr. Hibb books on Exploring Geology and Exploring Dinosaurs for older children are what I found most understandable and helpful.

Swamidass does not accept evolution

You’re in some sort of weird conspiracy world, dude.

Swamidass: The first cell developed through the natural process of abiogenesis, without divine intervention. Then, it duplicated and diversified across billions of years to give all the life we see today. A group of humans evolved completely naturally. After that human group evolved and developed, God specially created two humans, who proceeded to mate with the wider human population that already existed. Genealogically, it is possible for those two individuals to be our ancestors today.

Klax: CREATIONISM!

I would like to know your scientific refutation of this possibility. Swamidass is clear he does not necessarily even accept it - it is merely a possibility to him. Can you tell us all why it can’t work?

This is scientific, rational, epistemological, theological, Christological, soteriological, irrelevant, bizarre, modern, garbage. Trash. I finally managed to throw it out after 40 years just 10 years ago. Which shows its staying power. Which shows the paucity of our intellect which God commands us to love Him with. The appalling irrationality and ignorance of our epistemology. Our utter lack of faith which we nonetheless insanely, ignorantly proclaim as salvific. It’s nicely strange that my guttering faith, which has been majorly reignited, after years of dimming, by the redemption of Paul, is reinforced by this anti-intellectual, anti-rational, intellectually dishonest, desperate, deranged nonsense. Man up. For God’s sake, God in Christ’s sake, Jesus’ sake, man up. You’re living in a narrow Bible-belt echo chamber. Nobody with any education outside it thinks like it. Why is that?

@Gabe. There is no conflict whatsoever. The truth of the gospel of universal salvation in Christ is completely independent of the truth of science and greater rationality.

I think what may be your difficulty here is that most people today have already rejected the very “claims based in such things” (or have rejected, rather, the attempted universalization of some understandings of these comments of Paul’s) … so the wind is already gone from the sails of those trying to prop up these already failed propositions. Some women do teach men many things. In churches. Under the guidance of the Spirit. So those wanting to pretend the scriptures have prohibited all such activity already have a reality problem. Paul had reasons for giving that instruction to those people at that time. And his brief Genesis commentary was just his way of repeating what may have been commonly accepted at that time. (Like when he tells the Corinthians that “nature tells you that long hair is disgraceful on a man…”). Paul isn’t above appealing to their cultural assumptions to help bolster his expressed opinions on some of these matters. None of us are scrambling to scour scriptures for better arguments against long hair, because we’ve already left his conclusion behind - we know better than to universalize that into some new rule for everyone. Same thing with women being silent in church. It’s of little matter to us that Paul probably followed the common understanding of literal (and at that time only) understanding that the Adam and Eve story would just be a straightforward story of literal events - meaning that Eve came second. Because we have no need to justify something today (the silencing of women) that we, know is wrong. [And we know it’s wrong because we read all of scriptures, including all of what Paul writes, and not just a few verses carefully selected for some polemical purpose.]

Are you speaking on behalf of the entire body of Christ, @Klax, or just for yourself? Would you make room for others to honestly disagree with you about doctrinal issues?

Peace,
Chris Falter

Those are my thoughts as well. Aesop’s fables are probably a good example here as well. If someone was going on and on about how Aesop thought animals could talk they would be missing the entire purpose of the fables. We should also remember that myth is not a synonym for false. Myths have played a central role in human cultures, and they have long been used to communicate important ideas and truths.

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Please do Chris, the floor is yours. The arena. Intellectual honesty with open, disinterested, unlimited epistemology would be nice. A shave with Occam. Please justify the mental gymnastics that the good news of universal reconciliation in Christ needs God to slide in two magic people 6023 years ago, seamlessly into the H. sapiens half million year descent. I couldn’t any more 10 years ago in Angoulême. The good doctor is saying NOTHING new. This is not a doctrinal issue any more than it is a scientific issue. There is no sound teaching in it. But have at it.

Why did God need to create these magic people that were, that had to be, genotypically indistinguishable from the population they fed in to? Or is there some genetic change? It must be me that’s missing something. Me and all other minimally educated Christians outside the Bible belt. Although plenty of them believe in the Western illusion of original sin. It’s all about that still isn’t it? Finding a way to blame ourselves. To ■■■■ ourselves. If we evolved we’re actually innocent.

So God has always done this on every one of the infinite inhabited worlds from eternity?

Again, what’s different about Adam and Eve from their genetically homogenous contemporaries of half a million years? If the difference isn’t genetic, is it that God still walked with them and a magic tree and a magic snake? 6023 years ago? Or when? So they are still to blame and we need faith (only given to the elect predestined to freely accept it of course) in the PSA of Jesus or we burn forever?

Not that Ancient Egyptian, non-Jewish, antisemitic, degenerate, barbarous, ignorant, Western, Augustinean, dark-age - medieval, Dantean, Lutheran, Calvinist, un-Pauline, un-Jesuist, un-Biblical, un-Christian, unloving ‘doctrine’ is it?

Perhaps I can be of help here. Let’s consider that the truth value of a statement need not depend on the specific content, but on the relationship of the parts to each other. For this, let us consider the following algebraic statement

a + b = c

Notice that an infinite number of values can be put in place of the variables here and the statement would always be correct. The point is that no matter what the values are, the relationship between a and c is that there is some value, b, that defines the difference between them.

I think people immediately tie themselves up in knots, make a rod for their backs, paint themselves into a corner, and generally make life hard for themselves by using the material details of biblical stories as the centerpiece of their faith, staking their faith on the literal truth, rather than looking deeper at the relationship between things.

What is the underlying message? What is the real equation here? Do the values have to be a = 3, b = 4, and c = 7 for this to all work, or are there many ways to show that a + b = c? There are an infinite number of ways this equation can be write. Also notice that there also infinitely many wrong combinations of values too eg. a = 6, b = 6, c = 13. My point here being that you are looking for correct values and after all, isn’t it values that are the important thing? The correct values are any set of numbers that balance God’s equation and make it make sense. I think this is key to being able to untangle ourselves from these questions.

Once we understand this properly, we no longer find ourselves trying to square the circle. We no longer have to wrestle with the concepts of biblical inerrancy and scientific truth.

Augustine of Hippo was an African Christian. Thomas Aquinas was French. They both formulated a doctrine of redemption in Christ that incorporated a literal Adam and Eve.

I have never heard them described as minimally educated. Have you?

Many people all over the world today look to Augustine and Aquinas for doctrinal guidance. I see no reason to put a stumbling block in the path of their learning about the science of biology.

Peace,
Chris

By mere Enlightenment criteria, of course they were. At least old Thom finally realised it: ‘On 6 December 1273, another mystical [i.e. psychiatric] experience took place. While he was celebrating Mass, he experienced an unusually long ecstasy. Because of what he saw, he abandoned his routine and refused to dictate to his socius Reginald of Piperno. When Reginald begged him to get back to work, Thomas replied: “Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me” ( mihi videtur ut palea ).’ wiki

They, amongst others well over a thousand years, are the stumbling block.

Maybe you’re swallowing too much WEIRD kool ade while including too few Durkheimogens in your diet? I know you like Haidt’s The Righteous Mind as much as I do. Last night I finally got to chapter ten, The Hive Switch. When we look at the world through WEIRD lenses we are not likely to see very much of the sacred. On the other hand I never know know how to process A&E claims? In general Occam’s and the other requirements you’d like to see followed are fitting for empirical claims. But is that what is being discussed here?