Then I will gladly aspire to your standard in that area.
You would perhaps excuse me for slightly disagreeing when you change the topic to jumping to conclusions. It took 3 or so back and forths to get you to quit jumping to the conclusion that you knew what file folder to sfutt me in. But that is water under the bridge, let’s go forth in peace and friendship.
Hold on, now. The Bible doesn’t say God taught the names of animals to Adam. It actually says the opposite:
“Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.”
Im not sure I follow that logic. I am certainly not a universalist. I think you would not like my views on salvation. Indeed, Im pretty sure you wouldn’t. lol
But so what? You trash Genesis … now what?
Is this some reverse psychology you want to apply to Creationists to get them over to … whatever side you think they should go to?
You still haven’t explained the reason for your scenario… other than to boggle the mind of conventional Trinitarians everywhere?
It is amazing to me how few today understand the reduction ad absurdam technique. When I was in grad school in Philosophy of Science, I learned this and it is one of the most powerful tools in the tool box, but because our schools no longer teach logic, people miss what is happening, and that of course is my fault for having hope spring eternal that someone will have run across it somewhere.
Basically what I did was point out the modern theological view of Genesis 2 compared to the words which were written. There is no correspondence between the words and what is interpreted that they mean. Thus, in my view, If I accepted the modern views of Genesis, I would trash it. It would be illogical not too, and many atheistis reject the bible precisely for the reasons I outlined in what you complained about.
Well, trinitarians need to be boggled occasionally, indeed it doesn’t hurt any of us to be boggled once in a while. My explanation for why my scenario lies precisely in what you complained about. If one reads the Genesis account with the ordinary word meanings, it doesn’t match what people try to say it means. And in my view, God divinely inspired the Bible and if he is incapable of communicating truth and instead communicates falsehoods then he is not a god to be worshipped. thus, I try to find a way to have the bible be true and fit into the data of science.
LOL, Ok, another of my sloppy communications. But,In order for Adam to do that, he already had to have the mental equipment for speech. Since he wasn’t learning a new language but inventing language, the process flipped around a bit, and yes, God brought the animals to Adam, but God, it seems to me, already had to have told Adam to give each thing a name.
I learned mandarin in a very similar way, except I had to match a standard not make up my own. I went around China pointing and saying Zhe ge Zhongwen Jiao Shen Me? Which means “What is that called in Chinese?” It was a very similar process except as you note, God brought the animals to Adam and I had to go to the Chinese and bother them everywhere I went. lol
We’ve been down this road. haha. You were asking the names of things. Nothing Adam ran across had a name yet. What if every Chinese person you met had just shrugged their shoulders when you asked the name? How does God explain to Adam what a name is without using words? This one is a classic Catch-22.
Ha… the irony is delicious.
You write:
"It took 3 or so back and forths to get you to quit jumping to the conclusion that you knew what file folder to sfutt me in."
My response: See my earlier point above:
"You do not make friends easily if you are always blaming the listener for JUMPING to the conclusion that you are confusing."
I gave you a chance to explain yourself, and you used half ideas, and incorrect categorizations to explain yourself. Absolutely brilliant.
But, by all means… now we can BOTH say that is water under the bridge… and we can both agree to go forth in peace and friendship.
And you still haven’t responded to my “ask”: having determined that Genesis is a steaming pile… what next? Does peace and friendship also involve any juicy reveals?
What other evidence do you have besides Bruniquel? Anything that goes back more than a million years?
lol, I don’t see what bothers you Jay. In order for Adam to be able to name something, he had to have language ability. He had to remember the word, he had to say the word, and I do see God bringing the animals to Adam as teaching Adam to speak. Helen Keller’s experience was that she was brought to things to be given heir names, and when she had her break through she went running around trying to get the name of everything. Learning nouns is incredibly important for a language.
I guess Im not smart enough to see the distinction you are trying to draw here.
I think you are ignoring @Mervin_Bitikofer’s advice at your peril.
Creationists are not going to be overjoyed at the idea that Adam is millions of years ago… Creationists are comforted by the idea that Adam and Eve are well within the Homo sapiens sapiens “envelope”. You gain only resistance if you push beyond the “pale” Homo sapiens.
Jay, there is nothing absolutely certain back more than a million years. but there is some interesting things. Medieval Monks defleshed their dead. It leaves a pattern of cut marks on the bones. The bones were then put into catacombs. The marks are identical for cannibalism but many anthropologists believe either activity is evidence of religions feelings.
This is what I have for prior to a million year. I want you to remember that there is excellent evidence that H. erectus had a temporal planning horizon of days or weeks,https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/1999/PSCF9-99Morton2.html and that his predecessor A. africanus was able to recognize a symbol of himself, 3 million years ago in the form of the Makapansgat pebble (see does a small brain make you dumb? thread). thus we can expect that H. erectus could deal in symbolism and we know later erectines did. Given this planning horizon, they had the ability to think in terms of consequences. Shoot, Stone Tool making requires knowledge of if I strike here, I will ruin my tool, but if I strike there, it will be a good tool. this kind of thinking leads me to see that H. erectus would have been able to see the eaten as a symbol of himself, and know the consequences. Here from my religion is old page: But as I said, it isn’t certitude.
Defleshing or Cannibalism: Both are religious
Early Christians collected the bones of the saints and stored them in ossuaries such as the Catacombs.
" The use of ossuaries is a longstanding tradition in the Orthodox Church. The remains of an Orthodox Christian are treated with special reverence, in conformity with the biblical teaching that the body of a believer is a “temple of the Holy Spirit”,[1] having been sanctified and transfigured by Baptism, Holy Communion and the participation in the mystical life of the Church.[2] In Orthodox monasteries, when one of the brethren dies, his remains are buried (for details, see Christian burial) for one to three years, and then disinterred, cleaned and gathered into the monastery’s charnel house. " 26
Cleaning the bones would often involve sharp objects to separate the remaining flesh from the bones and that would leave marks on the bones. This was done for religious reasons. Using knives to take meat off of bones leaves the same kind of marks when it is done for the purpose of cannibalism. But either way, spirituality is involved.
There are some funeral rituals among the Homo erectus which are also consistent with spiritual beliefs. They occasionally treated human remains as did medieval monks and early Christians. Bone were defleshed and that leaves characteristic cut marks on the bones. Some say this is cannibalism, but cannibalism is a highly symbolic activity for humans. Consider the Lord’s Supper, “Take eat; This is my body…” We Christians engage in symbolic cannibalism, and it is not too different from what the Ainu do with the bear’s flesh and blood. So, even if it is cannibalism, it probably represents a spiritual dimension. Human sacrifice, as appears to have happened at Bilzingsleben also is part and parcel of spirituality (especially for a Christian who believes t hat Jesus’ sacrifice saves us from our sins).
" Although the reader may flinch at the suggestion that cannibalism indicates higher cognitive abilities, historical records indicate that cannibalism practiced by Homo sapiens in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries served ceremonial more than nutritive purposes. " 27
I might note that the Fore people of New Guinea also ate the brains of their kinsmen, and they got Kuru, this has left a mark on the human genome. I edited this to make it more understandable to the average reader:
” Kuru is an acquired prion disease largely restricted to the Fore linguistic group of the Papua New Guinea Highlands, which was transmitted during endocannibalistic feasts. Heterozygosity for a common polymorphism … confers relative resistance to prion diseases. [grm-Elderly survivors of multiple cannibalistic feasts have this heterozygosity but most young people don’t. The elder’s contemporaries,who had homozygotes died off.] Kuru imposed strong balancing selection on the Fore, essentially eliminating PRNP 129 homozygotes. Worldwide PRNP haplotype diversity and coding allele frequencies suggest that strong balancing selection at this locus occurred during the evolution of modern humans . ” 28
These authors say that actual cannibalism of this nature was widespread in human history and it affected our genes—there was a widespread belief that one got part of the spirit of the dead eating them. There is a family story passed down by my great great grandfather that a group of Native Americans who had killed my 5th great grandfather, ate his heart because he had fought so bravely. Whether true or not, the claim was, that this man’s father had heard it from one of the individual’s involved. The data above says cannibalism was widespread in our past.
" Although the prion gene could have been subject to other unknown forms of selection, available evidence appears consistent with the explanation that repeated episodes of endocannibalism-related prion disease epidemics in ancient human populations made coding heterozygosity at PRNP a significant selective advantage leading to the signature of balancing selection observed today .” 29
Symbolic and ritual behavior is evident among the erectines prior to 100 kyr ago. Thus to claim that religion is only found among the anatomically modern humans is false in the face of the anthropological data. Unfortunately, too many Christian apologists selectively cite data that supports their position and ignores data that doesn’t. In the case of ancient religion, this is a very widespread practice.
How old is the evidence for cannibalism? Quite old, possibly 2 million years old and it is among the H. erectus’s. This was either defleshing as a ritual mortuary practice or cannibalism.
" Microscopic analysis of a 1.4-million-to-2.4-million-year-old Homo upper jaw has yielded the earliest evidence of human ancestors cutting one another apart with stone implements much as they butchered animals."
“The fossil jaw, previously found in South Africa’s Sterkfontein Cave, bears several incisions made by sharpened stone tools, reports Travis R. Pickering of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The position and arrangement of the cuts suggest that a facial muscle was sliced off in order to remove the lower jaw from the rest of the skull, Pickering says. A wide range of butchered animals display comparable incisions on their jaws, he and his coworkers assert."
“ Until now, the oldest evidence of stone-tool cuts on a member of the human evolutionary family came from a 600,000- year-old skull found in Ethiopia. "
“Pickering’s group examined a specimen that consists of nine pieces of cranium and jaw. They studied casts of these fossils with a scanning electron microscope. “Trampling by hoofed animals and gnawing or chewing by meat-eating creatures cannot account for the ancient incisions, Pickering holds. The cuts retain the same color and appearance as surrounding bone, indicating that they were not produced after the jaw’’ burial. “No stone-tool marks appear on the more than 700 animal fossils found in the same Sterkfontein sediment layer as the Homo specimen, Pickering notes. “It’s not known why someone sliced off the Sterkfontein individual’s lower jaw. Possibilities include cannibalism or ritual dismemberment following death. ” 30
Of course we can’t know what was in the mind of a hominid 2 million years ago any more than we can know what was in the mind of a medieval monk defleshing his fellow monk. We accept that he was doing it for religion but somehow deny that it might apply to earlier hominids. Dean Falk says that it appears H. erectus seems to have opened up skulls with regularity and maybe because of their spiritual views:
" We, of course, have no way of knowing what Homo erectus thought about death or a possible afterlife. We do know, however, that there are a large number of Homo erectus skullcaps that look as though they have been deliberately opened. Too many, I think, to be mere coincidence. If Homo erectus did practice cannibalism, it could have been for any number of reasons documented in historical times. These include intertribal warfare, personal revenge, punishment, or rituals associated with rites of passage, such as birth, formal entrance into manhood, marriage, or death. Or perhaps Homo erectus simply ate the brains of his victims to assimilate their powers. We’ll never know for sure. But one thing is certain. Unless the numerous faceless, bottomless skullcaps from Java and China occurred coincidentally by pure, dumb luck, Homo erectus did have a concept of death. And that’s not bad information processing for 1,000 cm3 of brains ." 31
Falk believes that the widespread and common occurrence of only skullcaps is a sign of post-mortem body processing. A parallel with this skull cap processing took place 13 to 15 thousand years ago among anatomically modern H. sapiens at Gough’s Cave in Somerset England, where human skull caps were turned into drinking cups. 32 We accept the spirituality of humans engaged in this behavior, but want to deny it for the erectines when they do the very same thing.
References at https://themigrantmind.blogspot.com/2019/06/when-did-adam-live-part-1-religion_15.html
Edited to add, gotta go do something useful
@gblob
Going back to your original sentence…
I think I come to the same conclusion for you as for Genealogical Adam scenarios…
Any scenario you propose with an historical Adam, makes more sense 6000 years ago, than 60,000 years ago, or 600,000 years ago or 6 million years ago.
There is nothing about moving a miraculously created Adam into deep time that makes it more Biblically sound.
As I have already mentioned, homo naledi which dates to between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago and who predate the Neanderthals I believe. In fact they might not be the first but are simply the oldest that are currently known. That I am aware of.
Bill, you are certainly not required to look at what I referred to in the first post, but I know religion went much further back than H. naladi at 334,000 years ago. Therre Is a 425,000 year old site of Bilzingsleben that looks like H. erectus engaged in ritual sacrifice. But I am sure this is not new to you. Nothing so far has been new. And as I pointed out in the reply to Jay, in this thread before you replied, there is some weak evidence for religion as far back as 2 million years according to some anthropologists.
In your OP what I saw was
and to be honest, I don’t read posts that stretch across multiple screens so I assumed you were limiting yourself to the Neanderthals.
The only point of disagreement we have is you want to use science to prove the Bible is true and I accept the Bible as true without regard to science. Even though I enjoy reading about science.
The dates for the H. naledi fossils were a surprise when they were published. The mix of archaic and modern features led most to expect that naledi predated (or was contemporary to) erectus. If another example is ever found, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more than a million years old. Of course, playing devil’s advocate, naledi could have picked up its burial habits from contact with very early sapiens. We may never know.
Your argument here is along the lines of Coolidge & Wynn’s “Enhanced Working Memory” model for the evolution of cognition. Rather than language and symbolism, they proposed an alternative methodology to evaluate the archaeological record. It involved four components:
Here’s a 20-min. TEDx talk that covers the theory in its first seven minutes: The Roots of Religion: Genevieve von Petzinger. The rest of the talk covers her work trying to decipher the possible religious significance of European ice-age cave markings. The video is a few years old. Her book on the subject was published in 2017, The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols.
Or, if you prefer your science straight …
Interesting theory that cannibalism is a religious practice. My problem is that you’re projecting modern sapiens’ symbolic thinking onto erectus. Here’s a 1999 article that discusses evidence of cannibalism in Gran Dolina, Spain, around 780,000 years ago.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724849990324X
Here’s a 2012 article that reinterpreted the evidence:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248412001406
From the abstract:
The cannibalism documented in level TD6 mainly involves the consumption of infants and other immature individuals. The human induced modifications on Homo antecessor and deer remains suggest that butchering processes were similar for both taxa, and the remains were discarded on the living floor in the same way. This finding implies that a group of hominins that used the Gran Dolina cave periodically hunted and consumed individuals from another group. However, the age distribution of the cannibalized hominins in the TD6 assemblage is not consistent with that from other cases of exo-cannibalism by human/hominin groups. Instead, it is similar to the age profiles seen in cannibalism associated with intergroup aggression in chimpanzees. For this reason, we use an analogy with chimpanzees to propose that the TD6 hominins mounted low-risk attacks on members of other groups to defend access to resources within their own territories and to try and expand their territories at the expense of neighboring groups.
I don’t think anyone would argue that cannibalism among chimps indicates they had religion.
Don’t go getting humble on me all of a sudden. haha. Sorry to triple up, but I forgot to reply to this one earlier.
On learning language, I should give an example from everyday life. The proper comparison is not how you learned a second language, but how those who don’t have a language acquire it. We don’t remember the process, but we’ve all witnessed it in infants and toddlers. It’s not enough for the new parents to say, “I’m Dad, and this is Mom.” And once the infant learns to say Dada and Mama and associate those sounds with her parents, she is still far from understanding symbolism, let alone metaphoric thought. When symbols are only processed one or two at a time, truly symbolic thought isn’t required.
So, your first sentence is right. In order for Adam to name something, he already had to have language ability, and the only way for him to have that at the moment of his creation would be for God to implant it in his head. I won’t get into the problems that raises, but it’s essentially the same as “creation with appearance of age.”
There is nothing about the Genesis account that makes it helpful to go back past 7,000 or 8,000 years ago.
I don’t see the point of all your gymnastics.
thanks, I prefer straight science. Will read after I finish writing what I am working on now.
Edited to add, No, the difference is that Chimps don’t do symbolism in the wild, but early man did.
I wouldn’t think it has the appearance of age problem because no one else can observe Adam and think he learned language as a kid. (appearance of age). With the universe, everyone can measure travel times to this star, or parallaxes, or depositional time for various strata and see that they go beyond the YEC creation time. This is the appearance of age problem. but with no one observing Adam I just don’t see it.
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