Reviewing Adam and the Genome

In my view, this turns out to be a false history @Chris_Falter. On this one, it would be great to get @tremperlongman and @TedDavis and @JRM 's thoughts.

By “traditional” I mean “within the range of acceptable interpretations in the pre-science era.”

This is an entirely defensible definition of “traditional” and shuffles the deck. We find that traditional interpretations does not include Ken Ham style interpretations of Genesis which arise in the 1800s. Moreover, insisting on a historical Adam, to the point of dividing the Church, also is not a traditional view of our faith, which centers on Jesus not Adam. Traditionally, we see people outside the garden an old earth an more. None of this was insisted upon as central to our faith. This is part of what tradition gives us, a correct ordering of our priorities, and a proper grounding on the revelation of Jesus instead of human efforts to study nature.

For example, look at the Book of Enoch, which one of the extra biblical sources that YECs draw upon, part of the Ethiopian Bible, and dated to about 200 BC. Most interestingly, this is where we see most clearly the term “Son of Man” as a Messianic reference, and may be what Jesus was was referring to in his ministry (the Daniel passage notwithstanding). Without arguing if this book is in the cannon (it is not), we can take it as a 2nd Temple example of CS Lewis’s theologized fiction. It prominently includes non-Adamic beings that are biologically compatible with humans, and produce giants for hybrid offspring. It also clearly teaches that Eve was not the first woman created by God, but that there were others. This notion of non-Adamic beings is found throughout Jewish, Christian, and pagan interpretations of Genesis for 2 thousand years, and it is never considered heretical in of itself (though it has at times been mixed with other heretical teachings and racism).

About “traditional”, knowing the history I am unwilling to give rhetorical high ground to scientific YECs on this. They are not defending a traditional interpretation at all, but promoting a theological innovation they have no authority to make. The belief in 6-day creation is found in the traditional interpretation (see Origen) but it is never seen as central to the faith or provable by studying nature as a foundational sign of God. In contrast with their theological innovation, I root my faith in Jesus. To be clear, my problem is not with YEC, but with a science-rooted faith.

For those that think that this is just “playing games with words,” it is not. Rhetoric is important because careful and honest word choice is what guides people to correct understanding. Debates are lost over word choices like this, and entire histories rewritten. It is critical to present an accurate view of these things, and the scientific emphasis of YEC is a major deviation from traditional theology. For me, the process of affirming evolution was a return to orthodox theology. It was repentance from these sorts of theological innovations that I had no right to make or impose on others.

I affirm the traditional interpretation of Scripture that places Jesus above the diverse understandings of Genesis the Church has always harbored. Nothing in evolution requires us to deviate from it.

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Which is why I wrote…

**Venema and McKnight might have calmed concerns of many readers with personal confessions.**9 They could have explained how and why they personally came to know Him, affirm His Lordship, and believe the Resurrection. Confessing Jesus’ authority over all things, including science (Matt. 28:18-20), might have averted their after-science framing too. From the Empty Tomb, it seems untenable to interpret the Gospels after assuming the solid scientific conclusion that men never rise from the dead. Science is blind to the Resurrection and this blindness declares its limits; science cannot bring us to God or speak of when He acts. Therefore, in view of Jesus, why interpret any Scripture after assuming science?
http://henrycenter.tiu.edu/2017/06/a-genealogical-adam-and-eve-in-evolution/

`9. ‘When people utter the sentence, “I confess that Jesus is Lord,” they are confessing. They are not stating a fact about Jesus. They are enacting a commitment by speaking. By making the confession, you bind yourself to what you confess.’ Okamoto, Joel (2015) “Making Sense of Confessionalism Today,” Concordia Journal: Vol. 41: No. 1, Article 5. "Making Sense of Confessionalism Today" by Joel Okamoto

I would also add that this is what gave Francis Collins authority when he wrote The Language of God. His book was written to his secular colleagues and included first an extended confession of belief in the Resurrection and of Jesus’ Lordship. It carried authority because of the risk he took in making this confession, not merely because of his rank in science.

Sometimes I think we forgot his example, and turned our message exclusively to the Church, where the Ressurection is inexplicably “assumed.” Spiritual authority comes from taking risks, and the Church does not trust voices that are timid about declaring Jesus. I advocate a return to Dr. Collins example.

We need a generation of confessing scientists.

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You should probably let @BradKramer know =).

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I can see the wisdom of expanding our discussions to more frequently include Enochian themes… not because they are inerrant… but because they help fill in the missing pieces… and they can be inspirational in themselves!!!

Enochian literature is the logical place for any Christian interested in the backstory on angels and the patriarchal period!

Confessing Jesus is a perfectly reasonable addition to the discussion.

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62 posts were split to a new topic: Subjectivity/Objectivity and evidence in science and philosophy

Dr. Rana’s article, “If Christ Be Not Raised,” suffers from a common problem with the symposium. Namely, he spends more time promoting his alternative theory than actually reviewing Adam & the Genome. By my count, Rana interacts with Venema’s portion of the book in just two paragraphs, or roughly 100 of the article’s 1700 words. Not exactly a “review,” by my understanding.

A total side issue, but “Son of Man” was Jesus’ preferred term in public contexts precisely because it carried no Messianic connotations in his audience’s mind, despite its presence in Daniel 7.

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Christy, there is a rational scenario that would reconcile your position and Joshua’s if you are willing to give it some serious thought. He is correct in stating that sin cannot pass through DNA. But humankind is not solely the result of DNA. Darwinian evolution produced the species, Homo sapiens, but it took another 100+K yrs. to produce the human Mind that resulted in a behavior that makes us exceptional in all of Nature. And there is good evidence that this occurred suddenly–a Great Leap Forward that may have begun with a single person (Adam) or a single couple, A&E who spread it to the other Homo sapiens already present. Sin–moral evil–could only occur if the creature involved had mind and conscience–knowledge of good and evil. Sin could only spread when the first recipients of Mind (i.e. a programmed brain) spread it to fellow Homo sapiens.

Admittedly, this scenario will not become accepted by most scientists until a biological mechanism for ‘brain programming’ becomes well established. I have a ‘gut feeling’ (a Faith) that it soon will be. In the meantime it can be considered as a reasonable possibility. From a religious point of view, its major ‘flaw’ is that it offers no support for the Fall, and thus a rethinking of Christ’s role as Savior.
God bless,
Al Leo

@Swamidass invited me to comment on this exchange with @Chris_Falter. I gather that Chris’ original point concerns the interpretation of the Genesis “days,” not Adam & Eve (the main topic in this thread). If the topic is the timescale of creation, then much can be said about what the “traditional” views were. I’ll try to keep it short.

Prior to the final years of the 17th century (when some began to speculate about other possibilities), Christian scholars basically held either of two views about the Genesis timescale. (1) God made everything (as Calvin put it) “in the space of six days,” words that remain important to many in the PCA and OPC churches today. That’s the YEC view. (2) God made everything all at once, in an instant, and told us about it through the vehicle of six “days,” so that our feeble understanding would not be totally lost. That was Augustine’s view, from which Calvin was directly dissenting. For more on this, see http://biologos.org/blogs/ted-davis-reading-the-book-of-nature/science-and-the-bible-concordism-part-3

In both interpretations, the creation took place at the time of Adam & Eve–that is, there was no vast history of the earth or the heavens prior to the creation week, and there was no vast history of the earth or the heavens within the creation “days.” In other words, both (1) and (2) were “young earth” views, although Ham and other YECs today greatly protest against (2).

Did Ham-style interpretations exist prior to the 1800s? Yes, but (to be fair to the truth) the Flood was not often seen as having created the fossiliferous rocks prior to John Woodward in the late 17th century. In the early 19th century, however, a view equivalent to Ham’s was quite popular. It had a near-death experience as a result of the slow but steady acceptance of “concordist” views prior to the Civil War, a process that continued (perhaps accelerated) for the rest of the 19th century, such that by the time of the “Fundamentalists” in the 1920s there were no Fundamentalist leaders who held a view like Ham’s.

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@TedDavis

Hey, I like that !!!

Thanks @TedDavis.

I would emphasize that the scientific part of the AIG interpretation is not traditional. Moreover, the insistence that a particular interpretation of Genesis is foundational to the Gospel is not a traditional interpretation. Instead, we see a large range of ideas in the early Church about these things, when one gets into the particular, but it is never a defining part of the community till much later.

It’s not my position anymore. My only point in bringing it up was to illustrate a teaching that I think is prevalent in some less academic circles.

@aleo , @Christy

oyyyy

The soul is delivered to humans by God. He decides when to stamp souls with the “Sin” stamp.

As most Eastern Orthodox communities assert, Adam was the first to sin, but all of his heirs inherited the normal flaws of a mortal body, and inevitably sinned in their own ways in their own time.

I feel, as you say, that creation was revealed to man in six days. I have not Biblical or scientific support for this, it just makes a lot of sense to me. The timeline at which creation was brought into existence was not important to the message of the Bible, just that that it was created by Elohim.

And here is the final installment. It is a two parter.

From @DennisVenema:

And from McKnight:

I almost agree with McKnight that…

Before I move on I raise an alarm: no one in the reviews seems to care about historical context, either the Ancient Near East or the Jewish world that was contemporary to the apostle Paul.

However I did agree with him. Excluding me from this would have been nice.

Underscoring this point, there were many versions of Adam in Paul’s time. In full view of these many Adams, the early Church did not insert one into the historical creeds. We do well, then, to remember that the traditional marker of orthodoxy is the historicity of Jesus and the Resurrection, not Adam, and a confession that He rose from the dead (Rom. 10:9).

These points aside, I agree with McKnight’s main thesis. Fear not an ambiguous Adam; find confidence in the lucid clarity of Jesus.

I would also add that I agree with McKnight’s assessment of Paul’s views of Adam, that Paul things that Adam was genealogical. And that Adam is not necessary to understand Jesus.

Also, it seems that he thinks that I am arguing against Venema’s science (unless he just skipped over me again).


Regarding @DennisVenema thanks for your thoughts. I would just caution that there are several ways to resolve your discomfort with non-Adamic beings, and point you to CS Lewis’s work on this. Also, I am not advocating for this specific model, per se, but pointing out that it is a formal possibility. Maybe Adam and Eve were later, maybe they didn’t exist. Who knows. You certainly cannot tell from science that Paul was wrong in his understanding of Adam.

There is really nothing different about this model and those that @LorenHaarsma, Francis Collins, Denis Alexander have proposed, except that I’ve highlighted that this is compatible with a genealogical Adam. It is not as far an outlier as you might think.

For my part, I agree wholeheartedly with everything @DennisVenema and Scot McKnight have written in their responses. I don’t believe Dennis said that inserting Adam into the flow of human history 6,000 (give or take a few thousand) years ago was an “outlier” of an idea. What he said was that it was “horrific” and “ad hoc”. I wouldn’t have chosen “horrific” myself, but I might have if you caught me on the wrong day …

@Jay313 and @Swamidass,

I think @DennisVenema will get used to the idea … as long as he doesn’t have to describe the scenario in detail. :smiley:

The challenge is how to get YEC’s to open up the Geologies of their mind … so that Earth can be billions of years old, and that life was evolving millions of years ago, and that Adam’s kinship group would be a logical way to tie all the lose threads together!

Great discussion, and our thanks, @Swamidass, for bring it to our attention and putting it together.

I particularly enjoyed McKnight’s thoughts on concordism, and the effort to interpret scripture giving it primacy in it’s cultural, historical, and textual context, rather than forcing our preconceptions on it, impossible a task though it may be.

His closing remarks also hit home with the observation that boxing the BIble into a rigid interpretation is the surest way to force the scripture into an errant position.

I suspect space constraints limited their comments, but the series as a whole enhanced my appreciation of their book.

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Personally, I am not really concerned to try to change the minds of YEC believers who are secure in their faith and beliefs. McKnight took the words right out of my mouth when he said, “Those who want to debate the science can do so but I have crossed that threshold and am not likely to go back.”

It is my opinion that we should not be wasting time or energy trying to change the minds of firmly convinced YEC Christians. Instead, we should be ministering to those whose faith has been damaged (or destroyed) by the false dichotomy of “the Bible or evolution.”

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I agree, but would add that the real at risk group seems to be those who grow up YEC and then are thrust out into the world of new ideas with that mindset, and wind up rejecting the faith. We need to let them know there are alternatives before they make that decision.

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@Jay313

Evangelical networks are where the “victims” are most easily found … much in the way the ex- Mormons are frequently found hovering around Mormon websites.

The pollsters put things in perspective… BioLogos is essentially a branch of the Evangelical network… because we supporters forcefully promote God’s role in our lives … as well as in our biologies.

It is unreasonable to think those who have never been interested in God would suddenly develop an interest in God just because we attach Evolution to the idea.

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