No, I’d let him finish his beer. Do you think I’m some kind of barbarian?
I would tell him that he is taking a silly little label (“special creation”) and affixing it to something that doesn’t need a fancy label and that is unchanged by the addition of the label. I would tell him what I’m telling you: “special creation” serves no explanatory purpose. And worse, it makes it harder to think clearly about unspecial creation.
I think you are probably misconstruing my disdain for “special creation” in an explanatory context as some typical atheist skepticism about the supernatural. Yes, I’m an atheist, and yes, I think religious claims about the supernatural are bunk, but that’s just not the point I’m making about special creation.
I am puzzled by the phrase “special creation” in the context of the Christian faith - we affirm that God created the heavens and the earth, and Genesis gives an account of all aspects of the creation, including Adam. Just why would anyone add “special” to this?
The text’s apparent de novo creation of Adam and Eve doesn’t involve any Omphalos elements. There’s no evidence for a de novo Adam and Eve created with a false history; false memories, false scars from childhood, false wearing of their teeth, false callouses on their feet and hands, false immune system with the appearance of having encountered viruses, etc. The record doesn’t suggest any of this.
I view all statements regarding God as theological, including God the Creator. Consequently all theological terms can only be meaningful if they follow the required grammatical and epistemological requirements of theology.
I am currently (and slowly) reading Gregory of Nyssa, and there is an excellent part that shows us the difficulties in describing God (and the creation by Him) that is meaningful to us. To make this comment short, the approach is analogical, so that when we say God made Adam, we are not claiming we have a description of a mechanism that enables us to describe the act of creation in a way that, for example, we would describe building a car, or a house etc. Yet we are forced to use language common to us - the result is, our description always falls short. This rule applies to all things we discuss of God. For example, Christ restored the sight to a blind man by making small mud balls that He spat on and placing them on the eyes - we can hardly describe this as a special creative act for restoring sight, and hunt for chemicals in Palestinian mud that may restore sight…
the abbreviated term “special creation” fits nicely when discussing a certain category of miracles…
but not all categories of miracles.
Was the Dino-killing asteroid planned from the very moment of creation - - to be made and sent on its way from that moment?
Or did God make a miraculous event … in the midst of the ordinary naturally miraculous (aka, like using evaporation to make a rain cloud)… to have the asteroid suddenly appear and sent on its way …
“Special Creation” saves a lot of typing and re-explaining every time we need it.
I am always wary of a solution which is too neat, especially when it is specifically designed to overcome modern concerns about an ancient text. I believe the principle of lectio difficilior potior applies.
I think @Swamidass has already suggested this answer in his previous comment, but wouldn’t it seem a little circular / contradictory for Paul to be, at the same time, both [1] referencing Adam in a bid to establish the gospel’s universal appeal to all mankind based on universal sinfulness and [2] limiting Adam’s appeal to only certain, Adam-descended, groups of Gentiles like Greeks but not aboriginal Australians, reclusive Sentinelese islanders, and isolated Amazonian hunter-gatherers?
In other words, there can’t be H. sapiens around that have nothing to do with the theology he’s presenting, because the very essence of the theology (actually anthropology / hamartiology) that he’s presenting is humanity’s universal sinfulness.
Yes, I personally think it would be odd and contradictory for Paul to be limiting the universality of his claim in this way. My point is that this proposal does limit the scope of Paul’s claim to certain, Adam-descended groups, whether those groups lived in Paul’s time or in the past.
The whole point in appealing to the distinction between genealogical and genetic Adam is that genealogical Adam could have been recent – within the last few thousand or tens of thousands of years. If you take the identification of Abel as A&E’s son and as a farmer, then they lived in the context of neolithic farmers; in any case, well after the appearance of Homo sapiens. So the people &E’s children intermarried with were H. sapiens. This handily explains where Cain’s wife (call her Mabel) came from, for example. But it also means that Mabel is outside Paul’s universal claim. In Adam all die – but not Mabel. Mabel didn’t inherit Adam’s sin, and is irrelevant to Paul’s theology here.
What I don’t see is why leaving an Amazonian hunter-gatherer outside of Paul’s claim of universal sinfulness violates the essence of that claim, while leaving Mabel outside it doesn’t.
I have great difficulty in following any reasoning (or debating) the topic, so I will restate it as clear as I can. A distinction is proposed for “pre-Adam” populations and “post-Adam”, and this distinction seems to at times revolve around a “special creation” (Adam) and presumably a "non-special creation (pre-Adam).
Now I take a deep breath, as I note Paul is supposed to either include pre-adamites, or is excluding them (wow! )
I add the following"
Romans 5:11-16 (KJV)
11 And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.
12 Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned:
13 (For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law).
14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come.
15 But not as the offence, so also is the free gift. For if through the offence of one many be dead, much more the grace of God, and the gift by grace, which is by one man, Jesus Christ, hath abounded unto many.
16 And not as it was by one that sinned, so is the gift: for the judgment was by one to condemnation, but the free gift is of many offences unto justification.
The distinction is that of imputing sin when the law is given, and yet Paul states that all have sinned . Paul is showing that all who are aware and free to choose, have sinned, whatever their historic position - although they may understand this after the law was know by them- but the law enables us to understand what sin is. I would think an atheist may not accept the law, and the resulting debate/discussion would appear odd, and to my way of thinking, simply pointless.
This is an interesting point to lean into. I generally agree with @Swamidass’s point about “minimal literalism,” because at some point if you say “Oh, well Adam actually lived 50,000 years ago, because that way we can include aboriginal populations in our model” then you start to tread on some dangerous ground for most popular, working definitions of inerrancy. Since humans were hunter-gatherers long before farming or pastoralism was invented, would we have to say then that the whole farmer-vs-pastoralist setting of the Cain and Abel story is “metaphorical”? Or what do we do with that, if there was no such thing as farming at that point in history?
I haven’t read Warfield in a very long time, so I can’t speak too confidently to this point. But, it sounds correct. I would add only that Warfield was far more than “Okay with an old earth.” He was fully convinced of an ancient earth, and also of human antiquity stretching back perhaps even as far as 200K years. See this for details: Davis A. Young, The Antiquity and the Unity of the Human Race Revisited -- Christian Scholar's Review XXIV:4, 380-396 (May, 1995)
(I thank ASA for making it available. Everyone here should join ASA.)
The author of that piece, Davis Young, raises important objections to Warfield’s apparent indifference to great antiquity of humans–the same types of objections I would raise. The Bible depicts Adam & Eve as a neolithic couple. That’s incontestable, IMO. So, any humans several tens of thousands of years prior to the Neolithic period cannot have been descendants of Adam & Eve. Thus, the question remains: who were the first humans in the biblical sense?
I affirm Josh’s statement that Warfield is of great significance in this particular conversation. It’s not too much to say that he might be the single most important Reformed theologian from the past within the limited context of this issue. Might be. I could see a case for a handful of others, but Josh’s point is upheld regardless. Likewise, Keller is in a similar category for the contemporary conversation. If Josh’s ideas are consistent with those of Warfield and Keller, that’s going to be of great importance to many Reformed Christians today. IMO, those folks must then confront the kinds of objections that Davis Young makes in that article–which are independent of questions related to evolution or genetics. They are historical and anthropological questions that already were important in Warfield’s day, as his colleagues William Henry Green and George Frederick Wright realized–and struggled hard with.
Just a small point, I think you are confusing de novo with ex nihilo (out of nothing). Those appear to be two different traditions within creationism. De novo simply means “from the beginning” which can include a process where you start with raw materials and build something anew. In biology, pathways for de novo synthesis of amino acids start with simple chemicals scavenged from the environment, as one example.
While there is a lot of good stuff to digest, how does this all integrate with the idea that the final form of Genesis was written in the time of the kings, or perhaps even the exile and deals primarily with Israel and its neighbors, in an effort to explain the relationships and history of the Israelite people, with limited application to those outside of those borders?
Perhaps we should imagine possibilities that have a hope of aligning with reality, instead of imaging possibilities that lead into a fantastical maze of “maybes” and “what ifs” with no exit in sight.
Evolutionary science does not tell us what is going on outside the garden, unless science is now dabbling in the interpretation of Genesis. Science has nothing to say about “who’s in” or “who’s out” of the garden. Evolutionary science gives us the story of all of humanity, not some of it. If you and the empty chair want to draw a line between “the man” (ha’adam) in the garden and the rest of humanity, it is not science that led you to that conclusion.
Can you find a single one of those views that interprets Genesis 2 as referring to some epoch of human history besides the creation of man? The setting is basic to the story, as it is for every story, yet the recent Adam requires us to imagine that God created “every living animal of the field and every bird of the air” (2:18-19) sometime 6-10,000 years ago. The recent Adam creates an escape hatch for “the man” to slip unnoticed into history, but it does so at great violence to the text. It doesn’t even get the setting right!
Hmmm. I honestly don’t know what to call the recent Adam in a recent garden if you take away “speculation” and “wild theory” as descriptors. It’s inherently unbelievable and appeals only to those whose hermeneutic requires them to locate a man named “Adam” somewhere in history. For people without that commitment – an unbeliever, say, assuming we still care about reaching them – the recent Adam is a bizarre tale and a needless complication. Try to imagine a conversation with a non-believer on the subject. If I started to spin that complex web, I would expect to be laughed out of the room, honestly.
No, it is not beside the point. The empty chair has someone sitting in it whose faith is secure enough to reject science in favor of the word of God. They are not my concern. I have no reason to convince them to accept the science. Why? What purpose would that serve? Would it increase their faith? Would it make them better servants of the Lord? Would it cause them to love their fellow man any better, or pursue justice and mercy any better?
I am concerned, however, with the children of the empty chair who have walked away from the faith because they could not believe in a literal Adam or a literal interpretation of any of Gen. 1-11. Their objections matter far more to me than the objections of the empty chair. If God has given you the task of caring for the empty chair, then labor at it with all your might. But it’s not the task he has given me, and it’s not the task he has given BioLogos, if I may be so bold as to speak for them. Take this in the spirit that it’s offered, my friend, but it seems to me that you are conflating your personal goals with their organizational goals, and insisting that everyone (us bystanders included) adopt your task and your goals as their own.
No, I’m not confusing the two. De novo creation in this theological context means not connected to evolutionary history. Whereas the original creation is said to be ex nihilo, Adam was created out of dust and Eve out of a rib, so I don’t think any traditionalists are arguing for ex nihilo creation of Adam and Eve, and it wasn’t what I was talking about. I was just making the point that the idea of de novo creation is a construct imposed on or deduced from the biblical narrative. So Adam being de novo is not the only concern. I don’t believe a de novo infant Adam fits the constraints of the Genesis narrative.
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