I don’t care about his personal worldview, and it shouldn’t be used to disqualify someone right from the outset. I care about what science has actually concluded.
In plain terms, his statement amounts to:
“All current genetic evidence strongly argues against a two-person origin of humanity—but I won’t claim absolute logical impossibility.”
That’s a methodological caution, not an opening for the hypothesis as a serious scientific contender. In theological or apologetic debates, that sentence often gets reframed as:
- “Science allows for Adam and Eve.”
But that’s a category error. The correct interpretation is:
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Science does not strictly prove impossibility,
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but it does strongly disconfirm the scenario under well-established models.
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According to methological naturalism even the resurrection is “strongly disconfirmed”. Do you think that according to methodological naturalism the resurrection isn’t strongly disconfirmed under well-established models? As far as science can tell, the resurrection of Jesus has never happened.
You’re drawing an analogy:
- Genetics vs. Adam & Eve
- Methodological naturalism vs. the resurrection
And suggesting:
“If you say science only disconfirms (not disproves) Adam & Eve, then consistency requires you to say the same about the resurrection.”
That sounds symmetrical, but it isn’t.
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Terry my view on the subject is the same as Jeff Hardin https://biologos.org/articles/on-geniality-and-genealogy
“We agree on the authority of Scripture and core Christian theology related to human origins: God created all humans in his image with unique spiritual capacity to relate to God, but we are fallen and in desperate need of a Savior. And at BioLogos we agree on well-established scientific findings about our origins and our genetic unity. But within those commitments, friends of BioLogos have explored a range of diverse ideas. A good example of this sort of diversity relates to a Common Question at BioLogos: Were Adam and Eve historical figures? There is no single “BioLogos view” on Adam and Eve and the biblical, theological, ethical, and philosophical issues of our origins (e.g. see this 2014 book). The BioLogos range of views on this topic has always included views of Adam and Eve as real individuals living in a real past. Evolutionary science does not exclude an historical Adam.”
The key distinction between the two situations is: repeatable processes vs. singular events
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The elevation of an original pair to special sanctity and holiness is not a repeteable process, it’s a divine act; a miracle.
And science has not disproven the possible existence of an original pair.
It’s certainly possible to hold different views but the view that on original pair actually existed certainly cannot be ruled out like young earth creationism.
That was my point.
I think it is far more likely to find a scientific paper arguing for the possibility of an original human pair (like the ones I have posted) than a scientific paper arguing for the possibility of the literal historical resurrection of Jesus.
I’m not disqualifying him, I’m identifying him.
If that was true you wouldn’t be citing ID creationist material.
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With the purpose of putting a label and disqualifying him. You can’t prove his thesis wrong and you have to resort to the creationist label to make an implicit ad hominen which, in your view, disqualifies his argument from the outset. Don’t play these games with me, they don’t work.
I have cited much more than that, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But It’s certainly not anything new coming from you.
And I have also cited this man https://biologos.org/people/jeff-hardin among many others.
I explicitly said that you had cited more than that, and it is extremely dishonest of you to pretend otherwise.
And the “more than that” that I have cited goes in the same direction as Buggs. So it’s useless to put a label on Buggs, because said label doesn’t disqualify the argument.
Scientific research cannot tell that something is 100% certain - there is always the possibility that some novel hypothesis could explain the observations as well as the current explanation. In that sense you are correct.
The other side of the coin is that it is difficult to accept an explanation that seems to disagree with the observations. At least, there should be a good explanation telling how the hypothesis could explain the observations.
It is possible that there have been real persons called A&E - that is not a problem if we think that the historical characters have been mythologized. What is more difficult is to show that all living persons are descendants of only two persons, at least if the original pair lived within the last 100’000 years.
The genealogical approach may seem as a way to show that we are all descendants of an original pair. However, if we think of the question and method in more detail, the genealogical approach do not give answers to all fundamental questions.
If A&E were two individuals from a larger population, that lifts several questions:
- how could there be a ‘fall’ from a perfect state to a fallen world if there were before A&E a relatively large number of people around the globe and they had an evolutionary history that included violence, diseases and hunger?
- how did the ‘fallen state’ of A&E spread to the other humans that were not descendants of A&E?
- if only the descendants of A&E are ‘metaphysical humans’, what about the people living in Africa and America before A&E? Were the people who lived in America before the Europeans invaded the continent ‘metaphysical humans’?
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So you won’t retract your false claim.
Is it a false claim to say that you put a label on Buggs in order to disqualify the broader thesis I’m advocating? If that is so I apologize, but for some reason I think that was exactly your aim. Maybe i’m wrong, though.
You made some valid points. Give me time.
Yes. You are wrong.
It’s also a false (and libellous) claim to say “I have cited much more than that, and it’s disingenuous to pretend otherwise.”
I’m done here. Everyone can see what you’re avoiding.
I’ll take your word for it, then. And I apologize.
A 'two person bottleneck" and a “divinely selected or elevated original pair” aren’t the same hypothesis. A divinely sanctified pair inside a larger population is indeed not a repeatable natural process. Fine. But that concession actually gives up the original genetic claim. Once you say the relevant point is a divine act, you are no longer talking about something population genetics can positively model as an ordinary demographic scenario. You are talking about a theological overlay on human origins.
- If by “original pair” you mean the only two humans from whom all humans descend genetically, then standard population genetics strongly disconfirms that.
- If by “original pair” you mean two specially chosen or elevated humans within a larger population, then that is much harder for science to rule out, but only because it is now a different claim.
That is the key distinction.
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I’ll reply to you too, Terry. You and Knor have both made some good points.
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You are right about one thing: science almost never gives absolute certainty. But that isn’t the real issue here, the real issue is whether the evidence rules out a real original pair, that conclusion doesn’t follow.
First, you are conflating genetic ancestry and genealogical ancestry but those aren’t the same thing, as in population theory a person can be your genealogical ancestor without contributing any detectable DNA to you today, because DNA is broken up and lost through recombination over many generations.
That is why universal genealogical ancestry can spread much faster than universal genetic ancestry. Rohde, Olson, and Chang showed that the most recent common ancestor of all living humans can be surprisingly recent, and that a little farther back each living person has “exactly the same set of genealogical ancestors.”
Mathieson and Scally likewise stress that genetic data are “surprisingly uninformative” about genealogical ancestry, and that your pedigree includes “many ancestors from whom you inherited no genetic material.” So the claim “humans emerged as a population, therefore a real original couple is excluded” is simply not valid. It confuses genomics with pedigree ancestry.
Second, the view I am defending is not a strict recent genetic bottleneck-of-two claim, It’s more modest than that.
I’m not saying that all present-day human genetic diversity came only from two recent individuals, I’m saying that a real original pair is not ruled out if one is careful to distinguish the theological claim from the genetic one: that is also why the existence of a broader biological population at the time doesn’t , by itself, settle the matter.
Third, several of your objections are not objections from genetics at all, but from theological anthropology. Questions like “How could there be a Fall?”, “How did the fallen state spread?”, or “Who counted as metaphysically human?” are not questions about allele frequencies or pedigree graphs, they are questions about rational souls, original justice, and the transmission of a fallen human condition.
Science can constrain biological claims, but it doesn’t adjudicate those metaphysical questions, so it is a category mistake to demand that population genetics, by itself, answer every theological question about the Fall.
Fourth, I am not defending any model that would imply historically recent “soulless races” or geographically isolated populations of quasi-humans surviving into recorded history. I reject that model too. Any defensible account must (and can) place the original pair early enough that all historically known human populations already belong to the same genealogical human family. The later successful dispersal out of Africa is commonly placed around 70,000–50,000 years ago, and the first unambiguous evidence of modern humans in the Americas is around 14,000–15,000 years ago. So pre-contact Americans are not a special problem on this model at all; they are simply part of the same later human family. In other words, I am not saying that some historical peoples were fully human and others were not. I am saying that, if one posits a real original pair at all, that pair must be placed early enough that all historical populations descend from them at least genealogically.
Fifth, there is even a peer-reviewed paper that I have already cited that goes beyond the modest claim I am making. Ola Hössjer and Ann Gauger write that “The problem of inferring history from genetic data is complex and underdetermined; there are many possible scenarios that would explain the same data,” and they add: “We show that a single-couple origin of humanity as recent as 500kya is consistent with data.” At the same time, I am not using it as my main pillar, I’m simply treating Hössjer and Gauger as a supporting source, not as the central authority. Still, their paper directly undercuts the stronger claim that population genetics has already ruled out a real primal pair. And my own thesis is actually more modest than theirs, because I don’t need to claim a strict recent genetic bottleneck of two.