I think you are extrapolating this in a number of diverse and unnecessary directions. [quote=“Jay313, post:10, topic:36985”]
since they are the very building blocks of chimp society.
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I am at a loss as to how you can judge a chimp’s behaviour - what we have is an interpretation of observations by a human observer, who judges them according to human cultural notions. Only when a chimp tells us directly that it is sinning, would we be in a position to make such a judgement.
This also seems arbitrary - I cannot find a dating method in Genesis that can be used to arrive at an accurate age or time frame (although the Genesis narrative makes the evolutionary outlook uninteresting).
Nature, of all of the creation, was as God created it - Adam and Eve were in a special place, with unhindered communion with God - it is this that is central, and, following this biblical teaching, external modelling can fit the available data on the current human population to a time frame of about 10,000 years for a common genealogical ancestor (Adam and Eve).
I think that trying to make Genesis appear at odds with anthropological inferences is unnecessary.
Theologically speaking, the attractive part of a literal Adam is that it allows for a more tenable connection between the First Adam and the Second Adam, Jesus Christ, as described by Paul.
However, the claim of a specially created Adam nullifies that advantage of a literal Adam. I do not think a maturely created person, who did not experience any childhood whatsoever, can ever be a literal representative of mankind. One of the special things about Jesus is that He was born of a woman and went through the vagaries of childhood like every one of us. If the Second Adam had to go through all of that, I think it is most plausible or even necessary that the same holds for the First Adam.
For me, that consideration is pretty devastating for the view of a specially created Adam. It nullifies the main theological advantage of a literal Adam. That is why I prefer the view of the “ordinarily born and raised” Adam as a respresentative of mankind before God, just as Moses represented the Jews.
Someone better inform Jane Goodall! There seems to be an entire “scientific” discipline devoted to it, called “primatology.”
In regard to inserting a recent Adam into the flow of history, yes, the chosen dates seem rather arbitrary. They aren’t my dates. But, if someone wants to postulate a literal man named Adam placed in a garden around 4000 B.C. (6,000 years ago), then there are a lot of questions to be answered. The Fertile Crescent was the most populous place on earth at that time, with an estimated population of over a million people living along the Tigris/Euphrates rivers. God planted a garden astride those rivers, and no one noticed? No one tried to investigate and enter the garden? Did God hide it from their sight, even though the rivers were the highways of the day?
I’m sorry, but I couldn’t believe it even if I tried. The whole explanation is convoluted and contrived and illogical. It feels like a TV series I’ve been watching for years suddenly “jumped the shark.”
So, our dating of “Adam” conveniently fits the genealogical model? And are we talking about 10,000 years before today, or 10,000 years before Christ? Is it possible that when Jesus walked the earth in the 1st century, some human groups were not yet “theological humans”? Were some South American Homo sapiens still “not Fallen” at that time? Did Jesus not die for them, too, or was his sacrificial death of no benefit to them until they were infected by Fallen humans and made part of the family of Adam?
Anyway, I’ll leave it behind for now, but I’m not trying to make Genesis appear at odds with history or anthropology. Just the opposite, actually …[quote=“Casper_Hesp, post:13, topic:36985”]
If the Second Adam had to go through all of that, I think it is most plausible or even necessary that the same holds for the First Adam. … That is why I prefer the view of the “ordinarily born and raised” Adam as a respresentative of mankind before God, just as Moses represented the Jews.
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Agree. Kierkegaard said the same in The Concept of Angst 15 years before Darwin set pen to paper. As I’ve put it elsewhere:
If Christ, the second Adam, “had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect” to represent us before God (Heb. 2:17), shouldn’t the first Adam bear at least some resemblance to us in order to represent us before God? The answer, of course, must be “yes.”
My point is to highlight the unnecessary extrapolation from the narrative in Genesis to peripheral areas (even if they are interesting). My reading is that Adam was created from the earth, and he and Eve were in communion with God - the garden is also spoken as a special place for communion with God. I think that if we toss out these central points, the rest of our narrative will not make sense.
I grant you that it is tempting to provide a narrative that appears coherent and may accommodate evolutionary aspects of current thinking, but in my view, that takes the focus away from the teaching in Genesis. Yes Adam would have to have been typical of all of us as human beings; yes we move from the first Adam to Christ, and this is a powerful way of focussing our attention on salvation in Christ, and the new man that this entails. These teachings of the Christian faith are not modified or changed, whatever narrative people seem to need in terms of evolution.
My point on dating is that this too is external, and not derived from the teachings in Genesis - as far as the paper that deals with this model, the time frame is derived from the data.
I think you know that these were exactly my objections as well!
But then… pushed on with a prick of a goad from Brad … I suddenly came to this conclusion:
If the YEC “world view” was amenable to logic such as yours and mine, Casper, we wouldn’t be in the situation we are in right now.
So… is it fair-play to endorse a solution that I personally don’t hold to? Well, I think it is!
For more than a year, I have been able to sincerely support those BioLogos folks who prefer to see (who even insist on seeing) lots of “miraculous action” by God. But personally, I prefer a God (and a universe) where God has arranged almost everything to be produced and supported by natural law and processes.
If someone was an Old Earth Evolutionist… but occasionally God would make flagella here or there … wasn’t really a problem for me. So now @Swamidass (aka: The Swami) has formulated only a slightly different scenario from one I have already endorsed:
Millions of Years of Old Earth Evolution … with God’s miraculous production - - not of a flagellum, but - - of a special human couple… who merge into the rather large population of humans on the cusp of Moral Agency!
That’s a dramatic scenario for sure. And while you, @Casper_Hesp, and I shake our heads over the idea that there would be humans with no childhood experiences and so forth … this was obviously never a concern of YECs, right?
In my view, this is the missing piece… the piece that connects the YEC world to the world of Science. I don’t believe Science proves the creation of Adam and Eve, but I do think that there is nothing in Science and that prevents the scenario from happening.
If you believe in Miracles at all… you are already participating in this intersection of two worlds:
lawful order (with fossils and an Earth that is billions of years old)
+ + +
God’s divine and miraculous order (with Jesus as God, making wine, and Adam & Eve created out of dust).
I can live with this solution… as part of the BioLogos “Big Tent”!
When I was a Christian, I always found the notion of “special creation” to be problematic. I never saw—and have still never seen—evidence that required “special creation” as an explanation. (Fine tuning of cosmological constants is a slight possibility.) The only use for “special creation” was to create or defend some strange “supernatural” narrative, and the circularity of this maneuver is dizzying. “Special creation,” in other words, is only useful when trying to justify… special creation stories.
There is one partial solution for believers who want to retain intellectual integrity: evolution and development and cell biology and biochemistry provide explanations that can all be called “special creation.” I know that’s not what anyone means when they start a thread about “special creation,” but it provides some nice benefits.
No more need to concoct ridiculous “explanations” such as the bizarre 2-person founding of a human population as described in this thread, or ID in all its nonsensical glory.
No more risk of defining non-supernatural explanation as unspecial or even not from god. This kind of thing, which I called blasphemy back when I thought that word was an appropriate one to use, is rampant in discussions of “creation” by Christians.
Freedom to marvel at the real world of biology (and physics and chemistry etc) and even to be moved to awe and worship by it.
It would seem to me that the null hypothesis is supported in this study. What you have proposed is that a population with Adam and Even would be identical to a population without Adam and Eve. That would mean you have no signal that sticks out above the noise which supports the null hypothesis.
While this may be a legitimate theological position to take, it doesn’t seem to be a scientific one.
I’m still a Christian and will always be one, but I always found it a problem, too. I apologize for riffing on this again right after I said I was leaving it behind, but besides all the usual problems of how specially-created Adam and Eve learned to speak or to follow a rule, I want to think for a minute about what happened after they were kicked out of the garden. Whether 10,000 years ago or 6,000 years ago, how did this man and woman simply re-integrate back into society? Without parents or the experience of growing up in human society, how would they fare? Adam wouldn’t even know how to greet a stranger. Eve wouldn’t know how or when to wean a baby. They would have zero understanding of what we consider “basic” social knowledge, unless God implanted it in their heads. Hmmmm.
Okay, I’ll leave it behind for real, now. But here’s a final thought:
Just as a species or a language cannot arise from a single individual, “sin” could not be invented by a single individual, either. If “sinfulness” is truly a universal condition of mankind, it arose in the human population, not a single scapegoat named “Adam.”
You are right, somewhat, but that also misreads what I am saying. Affirmation of the de novo creation of Adam not a scientific position in the sense that science does not ever make claims about God’s action (methodological naturalism). So in that sense you are right.
However, I am not, nor have I ever, claimed that the de novo creation of Adam is a scientific finding.
Rather, I have demonstrated that science is silent on this matter, much as it is silent on the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth. It gives us no evidence for or against these things, including de novo creation of Adam. For this reason, it is a scientific error to say that the de novo creation of Adam is in conflict with the scientific evidence. If no evidence can be produced against a claim, it is not in conflict with the evidence. Those who disagree are welcome to present evidence against the de novo creation of Adam if they care to try. Other than arguments from theology and hermeneutics, which may or may not be valid, there is no evidence against it.
So science is silent on the de novo creation of Adam, and those who care to are welcome to speculate as much as they want about this option. Perhaps they are wrong, but their error has nothing to do with the scientific evidence.
The Deceptive God objection (which does apply to the Omphalos Hypothesis) does not at all apply here, because the history we read from Genomes is not false. It is the real story of those “outside the garden.”
The teapot analogy is not proposing anything different about what actually happened in the physical world. In this way, it maintains the standard non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA) division between science and religion. In contrast, however, the de novo creation of Adam is making a claim in the the physical world, which is ostensibly “science’s domain.”
Because of #1, the de novo creation of Adam is more reasonable than YEC, and because of #2 some feel the need to affirm it for the purpose of rejecting of scientism, over and above purely hermeneutical and theological concerns. For mirrored motivations, many will endorse the teapot analogy while entirely opposing the de novo creation of Adam.
None of those things is relevant to your claim re evidence. You wrote that your claim is “not in conflict with the evidence.” That’s true, but it’s inconsequential. Omphalos and Russell’s Teapot are both ludicrous claims that are not in conflict with the evidence. There are infinite universes of undisproveable claims that anyone could marshal alongside those classics.
To advance a claim that is “not in conflict with the evidence” is to barely meet the most rudimentary evidentiary expectation. So, congrats: magic special creation of anything, anytime, by any god, is “not in conflict with the evidence.” This is the very essence of a vacuous assertion.
I won’t get into it in detail here with you @sfmatheson. As you know, we both come from different points of view because I am a Christian and you are not any longer. I can respect that.
One of the foundational disagreements we will just have to live with is that I (along with most people) feel there is important truth in this world that cannot be proved or disproved by scientific means in general, or by genomes in particular. I, for example, believe that injustice is a reality of this world (a truth), even though science cannot name or adjudicate it, and is impotent to end it. Science’s failure here does not diminish in any way my affirmation of the existence of injustice as truth with which we as a society must grapple.
I understand we will disagree about science (though I am sure you care about injustice), but that seems like an intractable rabbit trail.
You would think so. Yet it is still common place to declare there is evidence against it. Why is that? Certainly correcting that false claim, to give a more accurate account of the science, is valuable to even you as an atheist. Right?
I do not personally believe in de novo creation of Adam and Eve, but to defend Josh here, I think your charges are only valid if scientific evidence is the only way of determining the value of an assertion. For those who hold to de novo creation of Adam and Eve, they would say that Scripture provides “evidence” with its own truth value. I know you don’t accept that source of authority, fair enough, but let’s be careful about sweeping statements about truth.
My criticism of Omphalos is also from a theological perspective: I think it is theologically clumsy and calls in question the character of God.
You are both mistaking my point, which isn’t about “truth.” (I didn’t use that word.) My point is very basic: any claim, whether it is based in “scripture” or in personal revelation or in hallucination, can be “not in conflict with the evidence” and still be vacuous and even ludicrous. And so, to claim as Josh did that special creation of some people is “not in conflict with the evidence,” wherein the context is clearly scientific evidence, is to make a vacuous claim. I did not write, nor did I mean to suggest, that claims about gods or their activities are not true or are themselves vacuous. “God exists” is not vacuous. “God exists and she is Alanis Morissette” is not vacuous. “My claim about God and Alanis Morissette is not in conflict with the evidence” is laughably vacuous.
To this, I would agree. Things “not in conflict” with the evidence can still be false, and even ludicrous. They may also be vacuous. Moreover, if chosen at random, they are most likely (ultimately) false.
“Vacuous” I understand as lack meaningfulness. You are right of course, that many things that are “not in conflict” with evidence are also meaningless. The same is true the other way. Many things established by evidence are also meaningless.
In this case, clearly some people think the de novo creation of Adam is meaningful and established by evidence outside of genomes (the Scriptural account). So, at least for them, it is neither ludicrous nor meaningless nor random. Whether they are ultimately right or wrong, they should be allowed to make their case for its meaning without constantly fending off false scientific objections. [Valid objections to specific scenarios should be handled differently.] I am sure you would agree.
I do agree, but would not have written “false scientific objections.” Some objections are not false, and are in fact ruinous for some conceptions of special creation of anything. But that’s not the point here.
And I agree too. There are certainly some conceptions of the de novo creation of Adam (e.g. that deny the population outside the garden) that are in conflict with the evidence, at least as I understand it. Valid scientific objections should be handled differently than the false objections. As you say, that is not the point here.
Just to be clear, this was the conversation preceding this post:
Christy: I think the argument goes that there is no way to prove scientifically that a single couple was not specially created and then their descendants went on to mix with the existing non-specially created human population, hence all the signs of evolution.
gbrooks9: But isn’t that still a spurious kind of logic?
Swamidass: No. That is how science works.
That led me to believe that you were saying that your proposal was scientific, but it appears that I misread your responses.
I would also agree with your description of your position. With science you need some positive evidence, but you are taking a different position in saying that your proposal is not falsified by scientific findings. I would say that you are breaking the rule of parsimony, but that is only a rule of thumb to begin with and not a natural law.