I agree, Beaglelady. If you read my post to @AntoineSuarez where I discuss the implications of my Origins hypothesis, you would see why I worry that it could be used to support ideas about racial superiority. On the other hand, it offers a better explanation for the puzzle Darwin faced when he transferred three native Fugians to the English culture and later returned them home.
I note that the strong evidence for the Great Leap Forward in Europe probably occurred 10,000 years after Homo sapiens had migrated to Australia. The Australian aborigines had a much simpler culture than the Europeans who ‘discovered’ them in the 17the century, and many of these explorers did consider them less-than human. But we know better. So did their Homo sapiens brains get an altogether separate programming to become Minds? Or did some already-programmed Homo sapiens from Europe or the Mid-East migrate to the Far East and transmit the programming through a language taught by the migrant??
Further research could support one or the other of these alternatives–or could tend to discount both.
Al Leo
So by Foundation of morality and law I mean the following:
Consider a primeval community C of Homo sapiens consisting of a certain number of individuals living together. If one of these individuals is a human person, then all other members of C are human persons.
Suppose a non-personal Homo sapiens animal A comes from away and encounters community C of human persons: At this very moment A would be transformed by God into a human person. God would do this to ensure that the human body is the observable basis for assigning rights, so that any individual with human body has to be acknowledged as a person independently of race, age, strength, health, etc. (in accord with Genesis 9: 5-6).
As I have already commented, there are good reasons to accept that immediately after the Flood all non-personal human animals living on earth were transformed by God into human persons (I will further discuss this point in a new comment that may help to clarify how my explanation works).
Consequently:
If one assumes (as I do) that God created the primeval human persons at around 3500 BC, then neither Modern-humans (before 3500 BC), nor Neanderthal-humans, nor Denisovan-humans are persons.
By contrast: The Fuegians [not “Fugians”, by the way] Darwin met in Tierra del Fuego and described with “racist comments”, and the Australian aborigines Europeans ‘discovered’ in the 17the century, are human persons independently of the fact that they had a much simpler culture than their discoverers.
Personal humanity (Homo sapiens personalis) is called to evolve blurring the boundaries between human races, but without blurring the boundaries between humanity and non-personal species (this would mean to destroy the work of evolution!): Interracial marriages are excellent, by contrast in my opinion “marriages” between humans and chimps would not be fitting.
Hybridization is an important mechanism of evolution (as I claim in my Essay). Therefore hybridization between non-personal species and in particular between Neanderthal-humans and Modern-humans (at the time when these were non-personal animals) is a very convenient thing on the part of nature. However you seem to assume that such intercourse may have occurred after the Modern-humans were ‘personal humans’. Independently of whether this is sinful or not, your assumption bears a problem: it implies to accept that within a community of personal humans can live humans who are not persons, and this really means to open the door to all forms of racial discrimination.
Regarding “God’s miscegenation law”:
Are you suggesting that I criminalize interracial marriage?
If yes, I cannot really understand how you can derive this from what I say.
I state that God took care to avoid that human persons live together with non-personal human animals.
Against this you advance that “humans” [“persons”] did intermarry with “Neanderthals and Denisovans” [“non-personal animals”].
And you conclude: “Antoine states that God criminalizes interracial marriage.”
I reply that your conclusion is flawed and means you are assuming that interracial marriage is a marriage between human persons and non-personal animals!
I think such an assumption is the most racist statement one can utter.
You should be more careful in misinterpreting my statements.
Regarding 3500 BC:
This is an interesting question. I will answer it with pleasure if you cease misinterpreting my statements. Otherwise I have to spend my time in refuting misunderstandings.
Well, misinterpretations may also help to improve formulations, and for this I am thankful to you.
So non-personal humans need contact with human persons which makes God transform them into persons. Al has already brought up the Australian Aborigines. They were living in Australia for thousands of years before white colonists arrived to make them personal human beings.
I have strong sympathy with @beaglelady in this strange conversation. The suggestion that a human being can catch “personhood” the way they can catch Ebola is not just empirically ridiculous – it is potentially profoundly problematic morally. As I think @beaglelady has been trying to say throughout, this “idea” implies that there was once (and still could be) a large number of non-person human beings who were indistinguishable from persons in every way except contact with invisible and undetectable magic dust. In other words, there was once (and still could be) a world where some humans were intrinsically dehumanized. It should go without saying that this is a potent basis for racism and xenophobia, and more specifically it has historically been the basis of the systematic dehumanization of humans called “others.” In fact, I would say that @AntoineSuarez’s proposal is even more insidious than overt systematic racism/prejudice, which typically offers at least the pretense of identifying the characteristics that dehumanize a person (skin color, lineage, religion, sex). The unreasonable “idea” being discussed here makes the dehumanization invisible, presumably detectable only via supernatural means. The toxic potential here should be obvious.
I guess it could be different if the proposal had any empirical or explanatory merit at all. But it doesn’t. It can only do one thing: fill in a perceived gap in a religious narrative that itself has no empirical or explanatory merit.
This idea is toxic and without scholarly value. I invite Christians in this forum to reject it and to consider this small potential benefit of doing so: you will find common ground with humanists like me, who seek to affirm human dignity in the strongest possible terms.
Stephen, before you declare an idea “empirically ridiculous”, do be sure you thoroughly understand it. The way you use "catch personhood" sounds like what I have been discussing as the Great Leap Forward, a term that eminent paleoanthropologists use to describe the sudden appearance of human culture in the Homo sapiens species that had been relatively dormant for 100,000 years. This sudden change could NOT have been the result of “normal” genetic mutation. Richard Dawkins (who is an acknowledged expert in Darwinian evolution) readily admits that the GLF occurred, but his only explanation for it: “It was as if the Homo sapiens brain was programmed.” His metaphorical comparison of the brain’s neurocircuitry with a computer,while admitting a current state of ignorance, at least suggests where future research should be directed. Your comment that the GLF is like ‘catching Ebola’ is simply derogatory, and not at all helpful; likewise invisible and undetectable magic dust. We should all be careful when deriding the ideas of others that, sometime later, we are not caught in a “blow-back” when those ideas show merit.
The mechanism(s) that spread the GLF (through language and other communications) from the area it first appeared (probably Europe and/or the Mideast) to the far corners of the globe to which Homo sapiens had already migrated, does leave the possibility that racial bigots might try to utilize. I brought this up in a previous post with @beaglelady. It is my opinion that @AntoineSuarez , in trying to salvage something significant from the myth of the Great Flood, is being mislead in who (and what) survived. But when he proposes that the difference between us and the “non-personal human beings” that preceded us is epigenetic, I am in agreement.
Al Leo
No, I’m referring to the description of how a “non-personal Homo sapiens animal” gets converted into a “human person,” as described in this thread:
The GLF is an interesting topic worthy of scholarly consideration. The notion that a human being becomes a person in an instant, by undiscoverable supernatural means, on contact with previously supernaturally converted human beings, is both ludicrous and potentially dangerous.
[quote=“beaglelady, post:53, topic:27852”]
Al has already brought up the Australian Aborigines. They were living in Australia for thousands of years before white colonists arrived to make them personal human beings.
This is a worrisome part of my hypothesis, beagle lady, but you don’t have it quite right. I maintain that, from Homo habilis onward, the increase in size of the (unprogrammed) primate brain was an exaptation–useful enough for survival, but having a much greater potential than was being utilized. In relatively recent times (~100,000 years ago) three species of Homo-- Sapiens, Neanderthal & Denisovan-- lived here concurrently and were similar enough to cross breed to some extent at least. All three had large enough brains that, if “programmed” properly, could render them “fully human”. But only Homo sapiens had the other features (larynx, Broca’s area??) that allowed an initial “programming event” to be passed on to others vocally; i.e. not the slow route of passing a successfully mutated allele to the next generation sexually.
Currrent evidence strongly suggests that the initial GLF event occurred in Europe or the Mideast about 40,000 years ago (hello Adam). But 10,000 years prior to this, some Homo sapiens had already migrated to the Far East and to Australia. Question: How did the Australian aborigines become “fully human”? Two alternatives immediately present themselves: (1) A second initiating event (programming) occurred; or (2) later migrants from Europe carried the program with them during the long (probably many generational) trek. in either event, the ‘program’ that arrived in Australia probably was somewhat different than what left Europe–transmitting a definite level of humanity but producing a significantly different culture.
So……the first Colonists did not MAKE the aborigines human–they were already there. But I guess we can forgive them for thinking that they raised the aborigines to a Higher Level of humanity??? But that revives Rousseau’s argument of the Nobel Savage , a nobility that Modern Society seems bent on destroying. The Aborigines viewed their world in terms of Dream Time; we Moderns walk on the moon and dream of interstellar travel to other worlds. Which is more truly human? Which is more pleasing to our Creator?
Al Leo
This Forum is my first chance to trot out my Origins hypothesis for discussion by intelligent, thoughtful scholars. As a result, I have had to sharpen (even modify) some of my previous arguments. So I cannot fault you or any others for misunderstanding some of the points I am trying to make–I’ve yet to understand them completely myself. That said, I want to make clear that the process of “humanization” that I am proposing is NOT undiscoverable NOR supernatural. My guess is that it will be found to be an epigenetic action resulting from DNA-methylation unique to brain tissue. How long it took for ‘brain programming’ to accomplish humanization in the distant past may never be known, but it could have occurred within one generation. How long does it take in each of our lives? Not instantaneous, acting like some ‘On/Off’ switch–more likely it takes from late pregnancy to the age of five, on the average.
On another post, I have discussed the interesting case of Helen Keller, and how her case sheds light on the humanization process. At the age of 19 months a disease shut her off from contact with the outside world through sight and sound. At this age she had only the barest idea that symbols, like language, could be representative of reality. It was truly a miracle that once Anne Sullivan showed her that water and its wetness could be symbolized with sign language, it constituted a communication breakthrough that ‘baptized’ Helen into the human race. Without an appreciation of Symbols, Helen would have remained much like the Neanderthals–almost human, but not quite there yet.
At best, my hypothesis for the Origins of our humanity needs a great deal of modification. So I take my hat off to the author of Genesis who describes it as: ‘God took the clay of the earth to form Adam, and breathed into that clay the breath of Life’. That is not satisfactory science, but it still is close to the Truth. Perhaps both Science and Faith are necessary.
Al Leo
My comments are all about the original post by @AntoineSuarez and subsequent comments by him, which I quoted. I did not mean to imply that you have proposed anything like his idea.
The GLF is very interesting, and I can see why it is especially interesting in the context of a discussion on personhood in humans. I doubt whether a simple genetic/epigenetic switch accounts for it, but yes it’s interesting and perhaps even remarkable.
I think you’re creating a really dangerous equivocation here between cultural development and human dignity. Yes, the Aborigenes were less technologically advanced than colonists, but that doesn’t mean they were less human. I think the option that must be avoided in these discussions is a sliding scale of human dignity depending on some measure of cultural advancement.
Antoine, we seem to be in agreement in postulating that ‘Homo sapiens animals’ became ‘personal humans’ by some non-genetic process. We seem to part company on what happens afterward. I believe that the mechanism will eventually be understood in naturalistic terms, terms that even an agnostic could agree with. I believe that all processes in Nature depend on God in this way. But I would be very wary of declaring that “God would do this or that” because we think he should, for example, "ensure that the human body is the observable basis for assigning rights". That not only presumes we know what God knows, but it opens up a can of worms in making the ‘observable human body’ so important in assigning rights.
I do enjoy our conversation, tho. I learn more from folks I disagree with than from those I am in total agreement. Let’s keep it going.
Al Leo
As you and @BradKramer have both noted, I am skating on some pretty thin ice here. That bothers me. But perhaps it may help clarify what some of the opponents in the “human vs. subhuman” debates really mean. Take Helen Keler’s case as an example:
As a 19 month old girl, Helen was on her way toward becoming “fully human”. Did her disability rob her of humanity? Certainly NOT. But did it change the type of human she seemed destined to become? Certainly! If I am not mistaken, beaglelady considers Neaderthals to be human. I would like to spend some time trying to communicate with one, but after many failed attempts to find subjects for conversation, I would hate to be married to one. The movie “The Miracle Worker” may have exaggerated somewhat, but one could not have had a conversation with Helen as a teenager. Living with her was a sort of Hell. (True with some teenagers today.) To a real extent, Anne Sullivan was her “birth mother”, allowing Helen to become a operational member of human society. That, after all, is a significant milestone of ‘becoming human’.
PS Do you have a reference to back your belief that Neanderthals understood symbolism?
Al Leo
Many thanks to all of you for this vivid discussion: In my view it reveals that we are debating something important and contributing with novel arguments to clarify the origins of humanity. I thank in particular Stephen for his definite commitment
I fully share this commitment.
I also completely agree with Brad’s remark:
With this common ground I think it is worth continuing this conversation: I am convinced that we can achieve a “GLF” in the task of giving a coherent account of the Origins integrating Science, Scripture and Theology. As Denis Alexander says: “If all truth is God’s truth, as Christians believe, such a task should surely be possible”
On my part I ask for your understanding if I cannot always immediately answer but I have a deadline for a submission on “quantum contextuality and divine omniscience”. Nonetheless, during the weekend I should be able to post a comment taking account of the last (really stimulating!) objections that have been posted.
Dear Antoine,
Thanks for taking the time to respond. As it seems that finding time to respond is hard, I’ll try to be brief –
You mentioned: “Assuming that there is biological discontinuity along with this “spiritual transformation” looks like invoking a “miraculous intervention” of God, somewhat in line with Intelligent Design. I think one can consistently explain things without invoking such a “miraculous intervention”
Embuing a body with a spirit is a miraculous intervention of God any way you look at it, and therefore not anything susceptible to useful argumentation. From my vantage point and for all practical purposes evolution the best available scientific explanation on the origin of species, a process of nature which I would wholeheartedly call an intelligently designed process by which God had His creation unfold in time. I assume this is not a point we disagree with.
Where we possibly disagree is in the origin of homo personalis. It seems to me after these discussions that the gist of your argument is: you observe the elimination of intermediate varieties, and assign “personhood rights” based on clear differences between the varieties that remain. If this is so, you are dodging the question, are you not? Evolution may have removed for you the cases that are tricky to decide, but you encounter the tricky cases again when you go back in time before written records of law allow “certification” of personhood, and closer to the point where the varieties were not all that different. And as we discussed, technology could likely pose the problem again in the future by “blurring the boundaries between humanity and non-human species and destroy evolution’s work.” (also in your response to Mervin_Bitikofer) Silly that might be, but how do we answer when that happens?
This is why in my opinion we need to look for characteristics of personhood that are do not exclusively depend on genetic closeness to clearly accepted persons, or to a particular way of expressing “law”, or ultimately, to the point in time of existence. Hence my comment on the importance of self-awareness. That seems to me like one essential characteristic of all persons. [And it may also be part of a different discussion.]