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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Hi all, I'm hoping to get some feedback on my solution to the Genesis/evolution debate.

I have a five thousand word article here:
http://originofhumanity.blogspot.com/p/draft-journal-article.html

My solution includes a 4000 B.C. Adam, an old earth (ours), as well as a young earth (where the Flood was), identifying the Tower of Babel language, and much more.

It's for those who have a 'flat' view of Genesis 1-11 (ie Methuselah really lived 969 years etc), and who accept the findings of mainstream science and history.

Anyone willing to comment? Thanks

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Fourth, note that the King James Version provides a good literal rendering of Genesis 7:20: ‘Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.’ This provides the impression that fifteen cubits (approximately seven metres) is sufficient height to flood the whole world. If so, this is a very different physical world from the post-Flood world, being extraordinarily flat.

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Further, in Genesis 4:19-24, we see hints that the activity of Cain’s descendants outlasted the Flood. Jabal was the ‘the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock.’ (Genesis 4:20). Jubal was the ‘the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.’ (Genesis 4:21). Fatherhood of a practice carries with it the implication of the ongoing impact of the father’s work on subsequent practice.

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Originally posted by Gamaliel:
few other than ardent fundamentalists, I suspect, would these days see it as a blow-by-blow account of how the world came into being.

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Originally posted by Crœsos:

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Fourth, note that the King James Version provides a good literal rendering of Genesis 7:20: ‘Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.’ This provides the impression that fifteen cubits (approximately seven metres) is sufficient height to flood the whole world. If so, this is a very different physical world from the post-Flood world, being extraordinarily flat.

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Why is the King James Version considered to be a "good literal translation", as opposed to most other translations which considers fifteen cubits to be the height of the water above the highest peaks? This seems a rather critical part of your thesis, and yet no analysis of the translation is offered to explain why we should prefer your suggested interpretation over another.

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This writer’s approach to reconciling the Genesis chronology with history and science is to make the following major claim: By understanding Adam-through-Noah’s universe as distinct from and parallel to ours, one better understands the Bible, and one can reconcile Genesis’ early chronology with known science and history.
More precisely, this writer’s claim is that the whole account of Genesis 2:4-4:10 and Genesis 4:25-8:14 is set in a different physical, parallel universe. The claim is that there were two miraculous crossings from that world to ours. The first crossing was the eviction of Cain from that world to ours, explicitly mentioned in Genesis 4:11-14 with implications described and explained in Genesis 4:15-24. The second crossing was the miraculous translation of the ark of Noah from that world to ours, implied between Genesis 8:14 and Genesis 8:15. The implications of the translation of the ark into our world are spelt out in Genesis 8:15-9:18. This understanding produces a more coherent reading of Genesis 1-11 than the traditional view, hence the term ‘better’ in the major claim.

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I am not a Christian, so I'm very unlikely to accept your assumptions much less your conclusions, but I don't think your conclusions will be accepted within Christianity either. You claim to have answered questions, but to do so you are going off the proverbial deep end into Star Trek territory. You are creating whole universes based on a non-standard reading of a couple texts in the Old Testament!

Again, I wonder what this is for. If it's a thesis for an M.Div. or similar, I'd be very cautious in presenting this to your thesis committee.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
(Just to add, of course the Hebrew doesn't say 'feet', but a given number of cubits, which the NIV rendered in feet). My point in Genesis 7:20 is that the Hebrew does not speak of the waters going above the mountains BY any amount of feet, inches, or cubits.
 

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Posted by k-mann (# 8490) on :
 

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Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Genesis, most scholars (?) believe was written by Jewish priests, possibly as late as the Exile period. They wrote it to account for the origins of Israel and hence it's a theological rather than an historical/scientific work in the way we would understand such a thing today. That's not to say that they weren't drawing on older, oral traditions etc but few other than ardent fundamentalists, I suspect, would these days see it as a blow-by-blow account of how the world came into being.

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1. The Framework Interpretation (most plausible from a careful reading of the text)
2. The Ordinary Day Interpretation (most plausible from a casual reading of the text)
3. The Gap Interpretation (almost completely without foundation)
4. The Revelatory Day Interpretation (virtually demonstrably false)
5. The Day-Age Interpretation (demonstrably false)

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For centuries it has been recognized that the six days of creation are divided into two sets of three. In the first set, God divides one thing from another: He divides the light and the darkness on Day One (giving rise to day and night), he divides the waters above from the waters below on Day Two (giving rise to the sky and the sea), and he divides the waters below from each other (giving rise to the dry land) on Day Three. Classically, this is known as the work of division or distinction.

In the second three days, God goes back over the realms he produced in the first three days by division and then populates or "adorns" them. On Day Four he populates the day and the night with the sun, moon, and stars. On Day Five he populates the sky and sea with the birds and the fish. And on Day Six he populates the land (between the divided waters) with the animals and man. Classically, this is known as the work of adornment.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
(Just to add, of course the Hebrew doesn't say 'feet', but a given number of cubits, which the NIV rendered in feet). My point in Genesis 7:20 is that the Hebrew does not speak of the waters going above the mountains BY any amount of feet, inches, or cubits.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Hi there, thanks for the welcome to all - just having 7 replies feels like a great welcome.
Just to add a personal touch, I'm married with 4 kids.
But to some of the responses so far:
@ Croesos - if you look in the NIV, there's an alternative translation which says 'or rose more than twenty feet, and the mountains were covered'. They put that in, because that's what the Hebrew actually says. It's just that it's hard to understand how such a low flood could cover all the 'mountains' - that's why other translations come forward. D. Snoke brought that to my attention in his 'Biblical Case for an Old Earth'. Of course, he doesn't come to the same conclusion as me.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
On the distinction between Homo sapiens and humans, my meaning is this: Homo sapiens is a biological category, while Human is much more. Human includes all the functionality and everything else that goes with being in the image of God.

For example, from Genesis we may conclude that only humans can marry. Therefore I would say only humans can make promises. Therefore I would say only humans can make laws, since laws include promises of enforcement.

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
So I don't think there was any biological change when the various aboriginal Homo sapiens were made human. I do think there was substantial change in ability and identity.

What confirming evidence do I have outside the Bible? There is the possibility of finding evidence of the Adamic 'strain' of humanity entering our world. For example, the raw data in Cochran and Hardy's study on Ashkenazi intelligence may be explainable in terms of my thesis. The study was trying to link Ashkenazi high intelligence with genes also related to disease. One of the critiques of their study was that evolution does not occur as quickly as they are suggesting. But of course, if we have two biological sources of humanity (and the Ashkenazis have a significant proportion of descent from Adam), this may explain the apparent speed of change. This is of course massively controversial.

You can read a bit about it here:
" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashkenazi_intelligence#Cochran_et_al.[/QB][/QUOTE]

Given our inability to measure intelligence in a consistent and non-controversial manner, added to our inability to separate genetic from environmental factors in such studies, this seems like grasping at straws. Your whole thesis seems to be based on nothing more than wishing something were so for reasons completely independent of any evidence.

In short, your hypothesis seems to be based on nothing other than personal desire to believe something for reasons completely aside from the evidence.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi Croesos.
I'm thankful that you're engaging in a serious way.

Your first challenge was certainly your best, and had me thinking new thoughts.
I do however maintain that Fifteen cubits depth of flood (around seven metres) is enough to kill everyone if there are no substantial hills.
A seven metre tree is still a tall tree. Even if there were trees seven metres tall and higher, we need to remember that it was a forty day Flood. No one is going to live that long without food, holding onto the top of a tree.

Your second critique is too strange for me to comprehend. I don't understand the logic that charges God with breaking his word, because we do, or because 'InHomo sapiens' didn't and couldn't.

On your final critique, I certainly admit that the extra-Biblical evidence does not compel people to accept my whole theory. For now, I am happy with a much more modest claim. My understanding of the Bible is one which allows both a 'flat reading' of Genesis 1-11 and an acceptance of mainstream history and science.

More than that, my claim is that at numerous points, mine is a better reading of Genesis that those which are more mainstream. This includes for example (1) my consideration of the decline of human ages post-Flood (not post-fall), (2) my explanation of the small number of high longevity people living in the midst of the large number of normal longevity people (post-Flood), (3) my explanation for why the animals only feared humans post-Flood, and why humans were only allowed to be carnivorous post-Flood, (4) the identity of Cain's wife, the people Cain feared, the residents of the city he built, and the place he was cast, (5) the reason why we can't find the Gihon and Pishon rivers, and why they flow in the 'wrong direction'.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
When you look at other animals still alive today, I think you can find analogous activity to that of pre-human Homo sapiens. For example, elephants are known to bury and grieve their dead

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Get back to me when you find evidence of elephants burying artefacts alongside the bodies:

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Intentional burial and the inclusion of grave goods are the most typical representations of ritual behavior in the Neanderthals and denote a developing ideology

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On your question of whether the 'two worlds' thesis is Biblical, 2 Peter 3:6-7 is important. I think a distinction in worlds is implied by Peter's use of the word 'present' (Greek 'nun'). He makes a distinction between the world of that time and the present heavens and earth. There's no need to speak of a present heavens and earth unless there was a former heavens and earth.

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I think the distinction he draws is between 'the world as they knew it' and 'the world as we know it', and as you rightly point out, the distinction he is underlining is one in time, not space. The same distinction as between 'this world' and 'the world to come'.

Which is not the same at all as what your hypothesis calls for, i.e. two 'worlds' running at least partly concurrently.

The biggest flaw in your case is the amount of completely unsubstantiated assumptions it requires to hold water. There's as much evidence that Ezekiel was visited by UFOs - or as little.
 

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Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
There's as much evidence that Ezekiel was visited by UFOs - or as little.

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Am I right in thinking von Daniken thought there was plenty?
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

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Originally posted by Zappa:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
There's as much evidence that Ezekiel was visited by UFOs - or as little.

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Am I right in thinking von Daniken thought there was plenty?

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I was actually thinking of this book. Cool illustration of said spaceship from said book here, but I suppose von Daniken would do too. Just as anachronistic an approach to the problem, anyway.
 

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Posted by Zappa (# 8433) on :
 
They put dipsticks like that in charge of aspects of NASA programs? Ye gods. They are as bad as the six day creationists.
 

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Posted by Johnny S (# 12581) on :
 

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Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
One.

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Is that less than 10?
 

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Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :
 
One of the worst problems with your proposal MikeRussell, is theological. God makes His promise to Adam and Eve, through their descendents. Your proposal necessitates that Noah and his descendents are the only inheritors of this promise among other populations of short-lived 'non-human homo-sapiens'. With this, you create two populations, who look the same, one of which are the inheritors of God's promises and are 'made in His image', and one of which isn't. Who nowadays are the descendents of parralel-world Noah, and who are the descendents of the other native population? This births the rearing head of discriminatory ideology of the worst kind. Obviously you don't intend this, but it is implicit in your proposal. Your only solution is a mass extinction event of the concurrent non-human-homo-sapiens species around 4000BC. But how do you guarantee this happened worldwide and that not all 'homo-sapiens' now alive are of two seperate species - such as for instance, those in geographically isolated areas from the spread of the new Canaanite 'humans'. I'm afraid if you follow your thoughts to their logical end you will be giving birth to severe racist ideology.

Plus other problems; God's promise to Noah is not to destroy the world again with a flood. Which world is He talking about? Why is there no sign, either in the text or the story, or in any later commentaries by Jesus etc. of Noah's 'translation' between worlds? The story follows Noah as he releases birds and waits patiently for the waters to gradually die down. When did this 'translation' happen? When he released the second bird, when he landed on Mount Ararat? There is no space in the story for you to insert this event.

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I do however maintain that Fifteen cubits depth of flood (around seven metres) is enough to kill everyone if there are no substantial hills.
A seven metre tree is still a tall tree. Even if there were trees seven metres tall and higher, we need to remember that it was a forty day Flood. No one is going to live that long without food, holding onto the top of a tree.

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While your measurements of cubits above ground is enough to kill all humans, the Genesis text suggests that all animal life was to be destroyed as well, with only representatives to survive, as the natural world was also tainted with sin. Enough birds, insects, even snakes and monkeys, could survive in a dense canopy above the floodwaters for long enough. Is your parrallel world now still existing somewhere still filled with animal and plant life. Plus of course, the bird Noah released could not find any living branch the first time.

Your proposal is just an extension of pre-scientific antediluvian concepts, which raises many more questions than it answers, and creates only a wishy-washy, clumsy construct that doesn't even end up explaining anything. Major problems need to be solved by your imagination since there is no evidence outside of your own thoughts and opinions. Once people start creating theories based solely on their own imaginative wranglings, it quickly becomes an exercise in futility. It's a shame, because you're obviously a thoughtful and faithful person. But I'd suggest your energies would be much useful if directed towards a greater understanding of God and a closer relationship with him, than trying to force alternative meanings out of a few chapters of the Bible, and creating additional parrallel worlds that Jesus and the Bible never mentioned. We have enough to be getting on with in this one after all.
 

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Posted by MSHB (# 9228) on :
 

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Originally posted by k-mann:
One of the 'explanations' I like the best, and which doesn't strain the text, is the one who is commonly known as the 'Framework Interpretation.'

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As you note, the Framework Interpretation has been around a long time.

You might also note that there is not only a parallel between the first three days and the second three days, but also a progression in the set of three:

The first and fourth days create light (primal physics here!) and the sun, moon, and stars - outer space.

The second and fifth days create the sky and the seas, and the creatures that move through them (birds and fishes) - terrestrial, it's getting a bit a bit closer to home, but not yet quite where we humans live.

The third and sixth days create land, land creatures ... and humans. Our people, our place.

So the framework starts far away in space with the sun and moon; then moves closer - to the seas and skies; and finally arrives at land and humans. It is a progression from far to near.

Whoever wrote it had a very organised and systematic mind. It is a literary work of genius, sadly muddled by people who miss the systematic literary mind and try to take it as a historical narrative (what history? There were no people to record any of it until day six), or as a bizarre pseudo-scientific puzzle.
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Yes, Mike, I am well aware that the Bible claims to put forward details of the first humans. Of course it does. It makes plenty of historical claims. But that doesn't mean we have to treat those historical claims in the same way that we would treat narrative histories written within the last few hundred years.

No, the comparison has to be with ancient histories such as those produced by Herodotus, and in the case of Genesis, comparison with other Creation myths and flood-stories etc.

I'm not saying we 'reject' the Biblical account at all, simply that we have to treat it in the way in which it was intended - which, it seems to me, is somewhat different to the way you're handling the material.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

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Originally posted by Gamaliel:
I'm not saying we 'reject' the Biblical account at all, simply that we have to treat it in the way in which it was intended - which, it seems to me, is somewhat different to the way you're handling the material.

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Fred Clark of Slacktivist has a post about why the term 'account' bugs him when applied to Genesis 1-11. A sample:

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An account is testimony, witnesses telling what they have seen. The speaker or writer -- the one giving the account -- does not need to be a direct witness herself. She may be a journalist or a historian compiling the testimony of others. But without some basis in such testimony from actual witnesses we haven't got what we can call an account.

When I point this out -- that the story in Genesis 1 is not an "account" -- the creation-ists get upset with me, as though I were attacking the book of Genesis. But I'm not attacking it, I'm defending it. Genesis 1 does not itself claim to be an account. It does not present itself as such and it does not willingly comply with those who would treat it as such. To read the story as it is, in the way that it presents itself, cannot be an attack. It's far more hostile to the text to declare, with no basis from the text itself, that it must be read as something it does not and cannot claim to be.

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That last bit seems particularly relevant to the subject at hand.
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Ok, fair point, Croesos. I hadn't thought my terminology through and hadn't considered the 'baggage' that the term 'account' carries with it.

That said, and someone will correct me if I'm wrong, don't some of the OT genealogies start with a formula something along the lines of: 'This is the account of the generations of ... So and So' and so on ... with all the begettings.

Back to the OP, though, I think you're right. That Slactivist quote is on the money.

I would say, though, that I do believe it's possible to hold to a conservative position theologically without treating the creation story in Genesis as if it is a literal account.

The big problem with the overly literal approach is that it takes its proponents deeper and deeper into pseudo-science ... all manner of far-fetched special pleading brought in to defend their viewpoint to the point where it becomes untenable, unwieldy and collapses in on itself.

I haven't the time to plough through Mike's whopping big essay to find out where it starts to buckle beneath the weight. But I suspect it isn't very far in. It was beginning to creak a bit when I gave up reading a few pages in ...

Conversely, I would say the same about attempts to rationalise some of the OT miracles - give an explanation for the manna or the quail, the parting of the Red Sea, the plagues of Egypt, Lot's wife becoming a pillar of salt etc.

It strikes me that these sort of attempts end up with far-fetched special pleading too, and often with explanations that stretch credulity far more than the biblical narratives (or 'accounts' ).

I 'pose where I'm at, I'm prepared to accept that there is an historical basis for much of the OT, but the farther back it purports to go in terms of chronology, the more myth and legend are woven in. Which doesn't mean that I 'dismiss' it or fail to take it seriously, it's the theological issues that it raises that are the important questions.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi Eutychus,

I think the grave goods question is one of the substantial challenges for my thesis.
So let me say, I consider you to be raising serious issues, and to be quite on top of the discussion.

In my longer thesis, I address this issue, but I’ll take another shot here.

Let me quote from Ian Tattersall, so the extent of the challenge is clear – ‘The most striking example of Cro-Magnon burial comes from the 28-kyr-old site of Sungir, in Russia, where two young individuals and a sixty-year-old male (no previous kind of human had ever survived to such an age) were interred with an astonishing material richness. Each of the deceased was dressed in clothing onto which more than three thousand ivory beads had been sown; and experiments have shown that each bead had taken an hour to make [...] Also found at Sungir were numerous bone tools and carved objects, including wheel-like forms and a small ivory horse [...] The elaborate interments at Sungir are only the most dramatic example of many [...] in all human societies known to practice it, burial of the dead with grave goods [...] indicates a belief in an afterlife: the goods are there because they will be useful to the deceased in the future.[...] It is here that we have the most ancient incontrovertible evidence for the existence of religious experience.’ (Tattersall, Becoming Human, 11)

In spite of this evidence, I still maintain that it is possible that the beings that did this were not human. A lot of it hangs on how you define human, and how you distinguish human from animal.
But given the lengths to which elephants go in grieving their dead, it should come as no surprise that the most advanced pre-humans went further. Rather than seeing pre-humans' burial of their dead with grave goods as a sign of their belief in the afterlife and religious disposition (using analogies with human experience), these practices could just as well be seen as the practice of deeply mourning and honouring a lost loved one (using analogies with elephant experience).

But even if these beings had belief in the afterlife and religious experience, does that make them human? I don’t think so, theologically speaking. From the Bible, we can see very advanced activity attributed to animals. Animals can speak to humans without becoming human themselves (Balaam’s ass). Also, Genesis 9:5 tells us: ‘And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal.’ If animals will be asked to give an account for their actions, this implies that like humans, they have some kind of innate consciousness of God (This argument relies on God’s justice – in order that God’s judgment of animals might be fair, animals need to have an innate knowledge that such a judgment is coming). So I think we can conclude from the Bible that animals have consciousness of God, and they have some sort of moral understanding. The most advanced animals ever made, therefore, could conceivably have buried items in a ‘religious’ kind of way, in view of an afterlife, and still not be human.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
You said earlier that

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Human includes all the functionality and everything else that goes with being in the image of God.

(...) only humans can make laws, since laws include promises of enforcement.

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It strikes me that if you're not careful, you'll be attributing so many "human" qualities to animals that they will be in danger of being more "human" than the "homo sapiens" who were in your outside-the-garden world. Can these animals have a "moral sense" and yet have no concept of laws?

I fear you're making a far better case for humanity (of any stripe) being impossible to distinguish from any other animal species - and for it being no more or less in the image of God than them - than you are for distinguishing homo sapiens from "real" humans.

If on the contrary you persist with your two-speed humanity, I agree with the poster who said that you are liable to fall into the trap (if you haven't already) of theorising a master race. Either way, balanced against christian orthodoxy (small o), that seems a high price to pay for having purportedly 'solved' Gen. 1-11.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi again Eutychus,

Let me say a little more on the definition of humanity. Obviously it's important in itself, quite apart from my thesis.

But first, in terms of Hawk's critique, I need to correct a misunderstanding:
I believe that sometime after Adam's sin (in Eden), all the Homo sapiens in our world were endowed by God with a (fallen) humanity. They all were then in the image of God. So there's no chance of finding Homo sapiens today who are less than human.

This is no more arbitrary than those who believe the first human existed around 120000 BC (the common ancestor of all modern humans).
Why should God have endowed that member of the Homo sapiens at that time with humanity? Of course, God knew this member of Homo sapiens would turn out to be the common ancestor of all humans, but at the time, it would look very arbitrary. Surely there were other Homo sapiens at the time - and why didn't they receive 'humanity'? Or did they? For those who try to merge an evolutionary account with a literal Adam, these challenges must be faced.

And my approach, I think, leads to fewer problems than locating Adam c. 120000 BC

But what about the definition of human itself? This is a tricky issue for everyone, not just for me. It's quite tricky especially for those who take an evolutionary view of things.

I think the image of God in Genesis 1 has most to do with humans being the rulers of creation under God. 'Let them rule'.... This is the foundational definition, in my view.

I think it's dangerous to define each human by functionality, since some humans have less functionality than some animals.

To identify whether a group is human today, using demonstrably Biblical notions, I would start by looking at a whole community. I'd confirm they did things that the Bible marks out as purely human (I think these include marriage, making promises and laws - but not keeping laws, which I think animals do in a certain sense). Then since the image of God passes from parent to child, any who are in such a community, even if they are severely disabled or in a coma, or whatever - they too are human.

Do you have a better account of humanity than this, Eutychus and Hawk?

I'll be back in a while to ponder the translation of Noah's ark and tree heights....
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Hi again Eutychus,

Let me say a little more on the definition of humanity. Obviously it's important in itself, quite apart from my thesis.

But first, in terms of Hawk's critique, I need to correct a misunderstanding:
I believe that sometime after Adam's sin (in Eden), all the Homo sapiens in our world were endowed by God with a (fallen) humanity. They all were then in the image of God. So there's no chance of finding Homo sapiens today who are less than human.

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Do you have a reason for believe this other than intellectual convenience?

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
This is no more arbitrary than those who believe the first human existed around 120000 BC (the common ancestor of all modern humans).

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I disagree. First, you're importing mythology into population genetics by confusing the concept of most recent common ancestor (MRCA) with the idea of species emergence. For example, virtually all gerbils sold as pets today are descended from about twenty or so individuals imported from Mongolia in the 1920s. Despite the recent vintage of the MRCA, that doesn't mean that the gerbil only emerged as a species in the early twentieth century. During my brief skim of your essay you seemed to make the same category error with regard to Y-Chromosomal Adam. While I can understand the urge to place unfamiliar scientific concepts into familiar patterns, it doesn't really work that way.

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Why should God have endowed that member of the Homo sapiens at that time with humanity? Of course, God knew this member of Homo sapiens would turn out to be the common ancestor of all humans, but at the time, it would look very arbitrary. Surely there were other Homo sapiens at the time - and why didn't they receive 'humanity'? Or did they? For those who try to merge an evolutionary account with a literal Adam, these challenges must be faced.

And my approach, I think, leads to fewer problems than locating Adam c. 120000 BC

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Wouldn't the fewest problems of all be introduced by simply positing that trying to fit human origins into your particular bronze age mythology makes about as much sense as studying the human use of fire with the starting assumption that it was the gift of the Titan Prometheus?

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
But what about the definition of human itself? This is a tricky issue for everyone, not just for me. It's quite tricky especially for those who take an evolutionary view of things.

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Seems a lot less tricky to simply describe humans as a hairless East African plains ape with twenty-three chromosomal pairs than to try to explain why we're the favorite critters of some magic being.

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I think the image of God in Genesis 1 has most to do with humans being the rulers of creation under God. 'Let them rule'.... This is the foundational definition, in my view.

I think it's dangerous to define each human by functionality, since some humans have less functionality than some animals.

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Isn't "ruling" a function, making your definition nothing but defin[ing] each human by functionality"?

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I'll be back in a while to ponder the translation of Noah's ark and tree heights....

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Well, it just seems that if you posit that waters covered the whole Earth it seems a bit ant-climactic to add " . . . except for the forests". Plus there's the question of the displacement of the Ark itself. If a thirty cubit tall Ark floats to a waterline above its midpoint when fully loaded, it's not going to float in fifteen cubits of water. It'll just sit there with its keel on the bottom and its top still above water. Heck, even if it has a waterline ten cubits above its keel it'll still run aground on the roof of someone's submerged house.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
I'm going to leave the tree height etc. for a bit longer. One question at a time seems optimal, and the definition of humanity will hold broader interest. But yes, I'm willing to concede that the trees must have been covered by floodwaters for the account to make sense. I'll probably concede much more than that down the track. However, I don't think such problems are terminal to my overall thesis.

But back to humanity and definitions:

I propose that Homo sapiens became human after Adam's fall because Adam is described as the first human in the Bible (1 Corinthians 15). Also, it can not be that there were fallen humans in the world before Adam fell, because 'sin came into the world through one man'- Adam

So I don't make my proposal from intellectual convenience, but in order to propose an understanding of the world which accepts both a flat reading of the Bible, and the findings of mainstream science/history.

But is my definition of human really worse than yours, Croesos?
You go for: a hairless East African plains ape with twenty-three chromosomal pairs.

Immediately you have removed many chromosomally defective humans from humanity, and reduced them to animals. The ethics that lead from such a definition should not be contemplated.

Also, theoretically, there could be a mutant ape with twenty-three chromosomal pairs who you will admit to humanity, but who is decidely still animal.

Also, you omit any non-material portion of the definition of human. It is for you purely biological. One problem with this is the implication that we are no more than our matter. So you have no place for a 'soul' or anything immaterial which distinguishes us from animals. It won't be just me that has a problem with your definition. Most people will rightly side with me that we are more than our matter. We all know within ourselves deep down that this is the case.

On the subject of whether 'ruling' is a function, the distinction I intend is between appointment and equipment.
Humans are appointed by God to rule creation. This is fundamental to our definition, and to the definition of God's image.
In order to implement our appointment, God gives us the necessary equipment (functionality). But the equipment is not primary, it's the appointment which is primary in our definition.

Get this wrong, and you can arrive at a definition of humanity that removes some diseased, comatose, or otherwise disabled people from the realm of 'humanity'.

On the question of whether I have erred in my usage of terms, including 'Y-Chromosomal Adam, feel free to point out where I have done so. I don't think I've ever used the term before.

I do accept the fact that prehistoric biological speciation is an arbitrary label applied by modern humans. There was a first Homo erectus, whose mother was a Homo ergaster. But that's just silly, since mother and son were clearly the same species as each other. But we need the labels, so we use them, despite the silliness.

Of course, I believe that in the world of Adam through Noah, there was never evolution, and so the species did not emerge from common descent. But that's another story.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I believe that sometime after Adam's sin (in Eden), all the Homo sapiens in our world were endowed by God with a (fallen) humanity. They all were then in the image of God. So there's no chance of finding Homo sapiens today who are less than human.

This is no more arbitrary than those who believe the first human existed around 120000 BC (the common ancestor of all modern humans).

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It is more arbitrary, since as far as I can see there is absolutely no evidence for this novel notion at all either in the historical record or in Scripture.

You're not trying to reconcile the available facts with your theory, you're inventing speculation to support it!

If I've understood you correctly, you start by assuming two categories of homo sapiens to explain the geneaologies, ages, and so on.

You go on to explain the older evidence of religious awareness in homo sapiens by a combination of minimising its import and assimilating it to non-human behaviour (thereby inadvertently granting elephants, chimpanzees and the like more humanity than quite a few humans, afaics).

Having introduced this two-speed humanity to explain away the historical record, you then dispense with it in a blow by saying that God "endowed" the non-human humans with humanity... after the Fall: just to avoid the implications of a master race still hanging around, you quickly upgrade all of homo sapiens to the same status.

It seems to me that this would involve God intervening massively in his creation to improve it after the fact. Which again, seems to create a whole lot more problems than it solves. One would have thought that such an across-the-board moral intervention on the part of God would have deserved at least a footnote in Scripture, perhaps somewhere alongside the bit where God talks about limiting mankind's lifespan.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Eutychus
I deny that there is no evidence in Scripture.
If you accept that Cain feared/married/built a city with people not descended from Adam (which seems at least probable in the text)

and if you accept the teaching that Adam was the first human, and that all humans derive their fallen nature from him,

and if you accept that Homo sapiens existed before Adam,

and if you accept that all Homo sapiens were also human after Adam's sin,

my conclusion follows.

So it really depends how arbitrary you think these four claims are.

I deny that I apportion levels of humanness to animals.
No elephant is appointed by God to rule the world, so they can't be human. My fundamental definition of humanity is that we alone are appointed by God as rulers, so I reject your characterisation of my position.

Yes God intervenes in his creation and improves it - many times. This includes most importantly him sending Jesus to die for our sins. It also includes him taking action to improve the outlook for humanity after Adam's sin. This action involved producing many more humans at that time - humans who would play a role in the final restoration and redemption of humanity.

It feels like time to move away from the definition of humanity discussion. In my estimation, my thesis is much stronger here than on the subject of the Flood, and the ark's translation into our world. So unless someone has something sparkling on the questions of human definitions....?
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I deny that there is no evidence in Scripture.
If you accept that Cain feared/married/built a city with people not descended from Adam

---

The assumption you have to make here is that not all homo sapiens is descended from Adam. If you are willing to make that assumption, there are plenty of ways of understanding the text which, to this observer at least, appear more plausible than inventing an entire alternative (sub-)human race which is suddenly upgraded after the fall (without a shred of biblical evidence of this extraordinary action) to level the playing field.

quote:

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I deny that I apportion levels of humanness to animals.

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I assert that this is not at all apparent from the way you were arguing above. You brought in elephants to demonstrate that animals exhibited "human-like" characteristics. Having endowed animals with grief, morality, laws, and goodness knows what else, you are reduced to defining humanity (as opposed to homo sapiens) as "that which is appointed to God to rule (whether it does or it doesn't)". That seems to me to be a pretty poor definition of what it is to be human, as well as opening up all sorts of cans of worms to do with authority...

quote:

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Yes God intervenes in his creation and improves it - many times. This includes most importantly him sending Jesus to die for our sins...

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Apart from the incarnation and its outworkings, I don't think any of the post-creation interventions of God in creation actually improve its moral condition in the way you speculate (upgrading non-humans to humans, even if it's only to become aware they are fallen humans, which seems to me to be a pretty perverse deal...).

quote:

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It feels like time to move away from the definition of humanity discussion.

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Not when your entire hypothesis rests on there being two parallel types of humanity. We can worry about the Flood later for my money.
 

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Posted by wilson (# 37) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
So I don't make my proposal from intellectual convenience, but in order to propose an understanding of the world which accepts both a flat reading of the Bible, and the findings of mainstream science/history.

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That is intellectual convenience. At least I think that's the polite term Croesus is using for what you're doing.

The root problem with your proposal is that you're treating the Genesis story as if it were raw data, evidence on the same footing as the observations that science is based on, and that as such it's necessary to reconcile it with the science. The fact that you can only attempt to do so by introducing such concepts as a parallel worlds, a two-track humanity and Divine intervention to "translate" folks between the worlds at necessary points ought to tell you something.

William of Ockham is spinning in his grave.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
I feel like I've debated you in a forum somewhere else, on a topic I now forget, Eutychus. Surely there can't be heaps of Eutychuses out there.

I'll defer to your opinion a bit longer, Eutychus, as to the subject matter. That's partly because the definition of humanity is such an important subject in itself.

I have long held the view that 'image of God' should be understood as about human rule. We are like God in that we are appointed to rule the world, just as God is. I held this position long before taking my current views on origins.
I got that view on image from the now Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen.

I was persuaded by two points:
The first, that in Genesis 1:26-28, rule follows straight after image twice in a row:
First in verse 26
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule..."
Then in verse 27-28
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them,

"Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

The second point that persuaded me about image being rule is that if you go for one of the many other suggestions (e.g. we’re like God spiritually, we’re like God in that we have a rationality, or that we have language, or that we have moral sense, or that we have freedom of the will), then if this defining characteristic of a human is removed, they cease to be human. This is unacceptable to my mind, since we must not end up with a definition that removes diseased or injured people from the category of human

So for those two big reasons, I favour 'rulers of the world' as the best understanding for 'image of God'

Now it was a long time after settling this in my mind that I started thinking about ways to identify humans (if there was ever a serious question about the matter). It was really when I contemplated combining an evolutionary view with the Bible that I thought hard about the subject: What actions, if any would be unique to humans? This is a different question from the definition of human question.

The question: how do I identify a bunch of humans? is different from the question: how do I define a human?

In defending my thesis, I have to address the question of how to identify humans (not how to define them) when thinking about the Cro-Magnons, and other advanced human ancestors who lived pre-4000 BC. It's not the question of human definition which is needed, but the question of human identification. Because if we can be sure the Cro-Magnons were human, my thesis is toast.

What would the Cro-Magnons need to achieve to be unmistakeably, certainly human?

And that's where I came up with my three answers - marriage, making promises, and making laws. If they did one of those, I was convinced I would have to say they were human.

On the other side of the same question is the challenge of what animals could do while still being animals. When I discussed elephants mourning, animals giving account and so on, it wasn't to do with the definition of animal or human, but traits for identifying them.

So, Eutychus, when this distinction is understood: that between the definition of humans and identification markers for humans - when that distinction is understood, I think some of your objections are removed.
 

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Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :
 
So, MikeRussell, let me get this straight. You argue that a race of homo-sapien 'animals' were forcibly endowed with 'fallen humanity' by God, in a completely arbitrary way, not because of anything they had done, or any law they had broken (since, as animals, they were incapable of understanding or following laws), but were condemned by God to eternal destruction despite this? And this act of God was solely in order to - well you haven't explained why - perhaps to keep Adam company in his misery? The fall in your opinion was not due to man's rebellion against God, but because God just decided to create a sinful human state and endow it to them? And He chose this world at random, as Adam's sin was carried out on another world entirely, nothing to do with the homo-sapiens on this world. I'm sorry but creating this vicous unjust construct and assigning the name 'God' to it is blasphemy IMO, and entirely against the just, holy and loving God as presented in the scriptures.

And even apart from that horrible theology, your definition of humanity is your weakest point, and you know it, as seen by your evasions, continual moving of the goalposts to redefine humanity to whatever you need it to mean at any point in the conversation. And now you try to evade the issue altogether using strawman arguments and declaring yourself the winner and moving on to niggling points of detail about water levels. Humanity is not and cannot be defined solely in terms of abstract 'rule' since you haven't defined that. How do you know which individuals have this 'rulership' status given to them by God. Your argument goes; that only humans have this, and you can tell because this was only given to humans. You've created a circular argument that is entirely unconvincing. And then you reduce its effect further by claiming that even if some 'humans' don't exhibit this rulership, or aren't capable of this, just because they belong to a community of people who do, they automatically become human. That doesn't make any sense at all. What about pets? A chimpanzee who has been taught sign language, and lives as a member of the family would be a member of this community and therefore a human in your argument. Your definition is no definition at all.

And you cannot claim your definition is correct just because of flaws in someone else's. Definitions don't work like that. I could say my definition of human as 'ape that can talk' is better than friend A's definition of 'penguin that can talk'. That doesn't mean I've successfuly defined humanity in all its complexity and splendour. I haven't even come close. Whole books have been written on the subject. You can't demand someone on a message board give you their definition and then self-declare yours to be better and therefore the correct one.
 

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Posted by Eliab (# 9153) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
The second point that persuaded me about image being rule is that if you go for one of the many other suggestions (e.g. we’re like God spiritually, we’re like God in that we have a rationality, or that we have language, or that we have moral sense, or that we have freedom of the will), then if this defining characteristic of a human is removed, they cease to be human. This is unacceptable to my mind, since we must not end up with a definition that removes diseased or injured people from the category of human

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That's a straw man, though. No one is arguing that diseased people aren't human.

Defining any species strictly is problematic, on an evolutionary view, because if you go back far enough, all categories merge. However workable and useful definitions by way of description can and do exist, and it requires only a slight modification to Crœsos's description (a hairless ape with 23 paired chromosomes of a certain local evolutionary origin or an ape descended from the same) to include as "human" everything that would generally be considered such. You could, of course, find some contrivance to test that definition, but it is a much better and more useful one than yours, which proposes that there are two sets of animals, who look identical, act similarly, can (presumably) interbreed, and yet only some of which are human by virtue of a divine appointment to rule. Especially as the one distinctive physical test of 'humanity' in your sense (longevity) has vanished.

The idea that we should prefer your definition to any of the more common ones, simply because the everyday definitions do not explicitly rule on the specimens where some normal feature of human-ness has accidentally been lost, is absurd.
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
It seems to me that Mike is just another fundie, trapped by the exigencies of his own woodenly literal framework into postulating extra-biblical and extra-traditional hypotheses in order to make his world-view cohere and 'fit'.

Move along folks, there's nothing to see ...


 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I'll defer to your opinion a bit longer, Eutychus, as to the subject matter. That's partly because the definition of humanity is such an important subject in itself.

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Thank you so much. It is an important subject, but more importantly for our purposes here, it is a core component of your theory. I'm afraid that when you throw your theory open to debate, you don't get to call the shots on what is worth debating and what is not.

quote:

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I favour 'rulers of the world' as the best understanding for 'image of God'

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quote:

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If they did one of those, I was convinced I would have to say they were human.

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Well short of coming across a copy of Cro-Magnon marriage vows, that issue is not likely to be settled any time soon. How can you assert so confidently that Cro-Magnons did none of those things? You prefer to do so out of thin air simply because, as you admit, your theory collapses if the contrary is true

Oh, and whichever Eutychus you met, I don't think it was me.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MSHB:

quote:

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Originally posted by k-mann:
One of the 'explanations' I like the best, and which doesn't strain the text, is the one who is commonly known as the 'Framework Interpretation.'

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As you note, the Framework Interpretation has been around a long time.

You might also note that there is not only a parallel between the first three days and the second three days, but also a progression in the set of three:

The first and fourth days create light (primal physics here!) and the sun, moon, and stars - outer space.

The second and fifth days create the sky and the seas, and the creatures that move through them (birds and fishes) - terrestrial, it's getting a bit a bit closer to home, but not yet quite where we humans live.

The third and sixth days create land, land creatures ... and humans. Our people, our place.

So the framework starts far away in space with the sun and moon; then moves closer - to the seas and skies; and finally arrives at land and humans. It is a progression from far to near.

Whoever wrote it had a very organised and systematic mind. It is a literary work of genius, sadly muddled by people who miss the systematic literary mind and try to take it as a historical narrative (what history? There were no people to record any of it until day six), or as a bizarre pseudo-scientific puzzle.

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Its also clearly paralelled in the structure of the Tabernacle and Temple as described in Exodus and Kings, and also in Ezekiels's visions, and even in the way the Heavens and the Earth are dismantled in the Revelation to St John. And rather less clearly in some of the opther prophetic visions and in God's reveleations to Abraham and to Moses and arguably in parts of the Gospels (though I am less persuaded of that).

And what's more its the one St Augustine used in his "literal interpretation of Genesis"

 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Mike

I am certainly the most conservative here. Far more than the excellent Gamaliel for example.

Recently I came to the realisation that I was in a trench about one grenade throw closer to no man's land than you.

There is NO scientific evidence for The Flood whatsoever and nothing but evidence against it, biological and geological.

Just as there is none for a YEC and nothing but evidence against it by vast orders of magnitude.

I hoist myself with my own petard as for a YEC to be true God HAS to be in denial to the point of lying.

I then realised that the same is logically true for The Flood. And other anti-scientific claims in the - to me - still theologically perfect narrative.

Barnabas helped reconcile that for me by quoting Jack Lewis quoting God: "They're MY myths.". Now.

God has continuously met us where we are.

To what degree we don't know, but He incontrovertibly has: applying the Sabbath during the Exodus (... and I STILL believe every word of that ...) retrospectively on our myths and materially random solar system which gave us the seven day week in the first place.

God is unquestionably pragmatic. Jesus was oracular, parabolic and allegorical in using Jewish culture to make His theological points.

He always has been.

From 'the beginning'.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I have long held the view that 'image of God' should be understood as about human rule. We are like God in that we are appointed to rule the world, just as God is. I held this position long before taking my current views on origins.
I got that view on image from the now Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen.

I was persuaded by two points:
The first, that in Genesis 1:26-28, rule follows straight after image twice in a row:
First in verse 26
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule..."
Then in verse 27-28
27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them,

"Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."

---

Ruling the fishes calls to mind that apocryphal tale of King Canute. I always thought that the ability to rule fishes was more Aquaman's thing than a characteristic of all humanity.

Seriously though, what does "ruling" over other animals, including non-domesticated ones, mean in this context? I've never given an order to a bird and had it obeyed. Wolves have never paid me an annual tribute or taxes or any kind. Is rulership just a euphemism for being tough enough to kill or drive off any other critter and, if so, what does it say about God that this is what it means to be "in His image"?

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
In defending my thesis, I have to address the question of how to identify humans (not how to define them) when thinking about the Cro-Magnons, and other advanced human ancestors who lived pre-4000 BC. It's not the question of human definition which is needed, but the question of human identification. Because if we can be sure the Cro-Magnons were human, my thesis is toast.

What would the Cro-Magnons need to achieve to be unmistakeably, certainly human?

And that's where I came up with my three answers - marriage, making promises, and making laws. If they did one of those, I was convinced I would have to say they were human.

---

It certainly seems that Cro-Magnons (who were biologically human) had some sense of the passage of time, which seems to be a requisite for making promises. In fact, the most generic definition of a promise is 'a statement about your own future behavior'. So you seem to be arguing that early (non-)humans lacked the ability to make statements like "I will join you for the hunt at dawn". Even the minimal organizational needs required to maintain a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle would seem to contradict your implication that Cro-Magnons had no sense of time.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Well, accepting Eutychus' call that I don't get to decide which sections get debated, it seems the focus is turning to the genre of Genesis, and how to read it best.

Let me say, I have long agreed with the Framework Interpretation, as described by Ken, and continue to do so. But that's Genesis 1. The key passages that drove me to date Adam at 4000 BC are Genesis 5 and 11.

I became persuaded that the 'gaps in the genealogy' approach does not allow any extra time at all. See my article for the argument.

Yes, I admit my first post to Gamaliel only handled half of his critique, and he seems to have been frustrated that I focused elsewhere in the meantime.
As I briefly mentioned, I think Richard Dawkins did a fine enough job showing that the Bible and science have 'overlapping magisteria'.
What I didn't address was Gamaliel's claim that I was not handling Genesis according to the type of literature it represents.

I don't know exactly what school of thought Gamaliel is from in this regard, but I'll take on one approach with which I'm familiar and with which I disagree:

that's the approach that says Genesis 1-11 is 'prehistory' and 'myth', with the historical material commencing at chapter 12.

My critiques of this approach include the following:

The text itself shows no indications of such a split. Chapter 12 flows on smoothly from chapter 11.
This is especially so with the presentation of the lifespans of the characters. The decline in ages starts in the genealogy of chapter 11, and continues through to the end of Genesis.
Also, the Tower of Babel story presents enough information to attempt to date the story historically.
Also, a 'mythical' approach to Genesis 1-11 struggles to say to what extent the characters were 'real'. This clashes with the New Testament appropriation of the stories.
The New Testament and Jesus certainly accept various of those Genesis 1-11 characters as 'real', and makes application as though the descriptions represent genuine history. Take for example Paul with 'Adam was formed first', or 'Eve was the one deceived', or Peter with his descriptions of the Flood, in particular with Jesus preaching to the spirits of those who perished in Noah's day.

My sense is that fairly few here who will accept such an argument, because of presuppositions. So I mention this defence: I think the guy who was God and who rose from the dead with an immortal body would know. When he said he'd lead his apostles into all truth, I think he's capable of doing it, and in fact did it. I have a great deal of confidence in the historical arguments for Jesus' resurrection.

Anyway, if Gamaliel or anyone else wants to bring an argument from Herodotus on why Genesis 1-11 (or Genesis as a whole?) should be treated as myth, I'm all ears.
 

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Posted by Anglican_Brat (# 12349) on :
 

quote:

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My sense is that fairly few here who will accept such an argument, because of presuppositions. So I mention this defence: I think the guy who was God and who rose from the dead with an immortal body would know. When he said he'd lead his apostles into all truth, I think he's capable of doing it, and in fact did it.

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Not necessarily, I believe that Jesus Christ is God, and I also think that he had a 1st century cosmology which is vastly different from our own.

They are not contradictory, because of the doctrine of kenosis.

In the doctrine of kenosis, the Son, while remaining fully God, gave up a certain degree of divinity to become fully human. Being fully human means accepting fully the contingent perspective of his cultural upbringing. I suppose Our Lord should have spouted Darwinian evolution, String theory, and the Documentary Hypothesis during his 30 or so years on earth. But he didn't, because his fellow people would have been

Now of course, Our Lord could have indeed known the knowledge of the world and simply did not share it because it was irrelevant to his mission to the world. That I don't know, pondering the dual nature of Christ gives me a headache after a while.

I take Genesis as a myth simply because that is how we understand its spiritual meaning. To twist it in a pseudo-scientific text robs it as its deep spiritual meaning. Much of our modern distaste for myth stems from our Enlightenment presuppositions which upholds scientific reasoning over other forms of knowledge such as poetry, music, and yes, religious myths. To turn Genesis into a scientific text is about as preposterious as stating that a poem about roses is a scientific text about botany.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Take for example Paul with 'Adam was formed first', or 'Eve was the one deceived'

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Interesting you should take those examples, both from the same passage. I had already been thinking of asking you whether, what with your definition of human and of being in the image of God being "appointed to rule by God" and all, you believe males to be more in the image of God than females?
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

@Anglican-Brat:
It seems that you think I'm using Genesis as a pseudo-scientific text. I deny your claim. I do see Genesis as making historical claims, some of which intersect with scientific claims. In particular, I see Genesis claiming particular life-spans for particular individuals, which can be added to produce a chronology. This understanding did not appear with the Enlightenment, as I expect you know. My understanding sits as part of a long line of understanding from pre-Christ Jewish scholars through Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and pretty much every Christian theologian until the 19th century.

As such, your critique of my approach misses the mark - it can't be Enlightenment thinking that's making me struggle regarding the genre of Genesis. This is because the key which drives my thesis (the chronology derived from the genealogies) comes out of an understanding of Genesis which both pre-dates and post-dates the Enlightenment.


Let me finish this post by writing a little more on the image of God and the definition of humanity, since my view seems to be misunderstood:

Abortion and euthanasia and genetic engineering and conservation and animal liberation, racism, sexism, meaninglessness and existentialism and Marxism and Freudianism and fascism and so on are all addressed embryonically in Gen 1:26-28 ‘then God said’, in verse 26 ‘let us make man in our image, in our likeness’. In that phrase, ‘the image of God’, we have raised the issues of philosophies today. Lying in the assumption base of all those issues that I mentioned and others there is the central question of what is human.
The Christian contribution is caught in the key phrase ‘the image of God’. But what does it mean? In what way does Genesis claim that we are like God?

I'm saying that the answer is that we are appointed by God to rule the world under him.
Psalm 8 gives one picture of it: 'You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet'

Hebrews 2 takes this up, and points out that Jesus is the particular human to whom everything has been subjected, yet not all things are presently subject to him. The idea is that things will only be fully subject to humanity when they are fully subjected to Jesus after his return.

So what's the take home message? the world is made for humans, not for animals or angels, or aliens, or anything else. For now, before Jesus' return, we humans have a job to lovingly care and rule the world, just as God would have us do. In that sense, we are in God's image - we are appointed rulers of the world under him.

Within Christian historical theology, this isn't novel. It's one of the mainline understandings of the image of God.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

---

Well, a lot of complementarians would argue as follows:

- man (a single being) was created in the image of God

- woman was created later and derivatively, so she is only derivatively in the image of God

- this order of things reflects an ordering of the Trinity in which the Son is subordinate to the Father, so woman is by nature subordinate to man, who "rules" (they might not actually put it that way, but that's what it amounts to).

So I hope you can see that asking whether your "image of God = right/calling to rule" corresponds just to men or to mankind as a whole is apposite here.

quote:

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we humans have a job to lovingly care and rule the world, just as God would have us do. In that sense, we are in God's image - we are appointed rulers of the world under him.

Within Christian historical theology, this isn't novel. It's one of the mainline understandings of the image of God.

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Although people might quibble with the word "rule", that's certainly not all that novel. What is entirely novel is your requirement for a parallel race of not-quite-humans who don't make the cut despite being to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from 'human' humans apart from not living so long as the first 'human' humans and not being appointed to "rule".
 

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Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

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Well, a lot of complementarians would argue as follows:

- man (a single being) was created in the image of God

- woman was created later and derivatively, so she is only derivatively in the image of God

---

Does this contradict the clear scriptural teaching, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them"?
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Then you don't know what myth is Mike.

Or allegory.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

---

Well, a lot of complementarians would argue as follows:

- man (a single being) was created in the image of God

- woman was created later and derivatively, so she is only derivatively in the image of God

---

Does this contradict the clear scriptural teaching, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them"?

---

I don't know. Ask a complementarian. Or don't; they tend to waffle on about differences in "role" without actually admitting to subordination. For further reading: The Trinity and Subordinationism, about the only theological work I've read from end to end in seven years.
 

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Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

---

Originally posted by mousethief:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@eutychus Wow, I certainly don't think that males are more in the image of God than females. I don't know anyone who thinks that way.

---

Well, a lot of complementarians would argue as follows:

- man (a single being) was created in the image of God

- woman was created later and derivatively, so she is only derivatively in the image of God

---

Does this contradict the clear scriptural teaching, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them"?

---

I don't know. Ask a complementarian. Or don't; they tend to waffle on about differences in "role" without actually admitting to subordination. For further reading: The Trinity and Subordinationism, about the only theological work I've read from end to end in seven years.

---

I don't think that's a valid representation of the complementarianist position. I'm not sure where you get that argument about 'only derivitively in the image of God' from, but from reading the wikipedia article you linked to and the Danvers Statement, which is generally considered their statement of core beliefs, such a concept isn't mentioned and seems it would be soundly rejected by their first Affirmation.

I would echo MikeRussell's surprise at the argument you quoted. I certainly have never come across anyone who claims that men and women are not both equally created in the image of God, despite their beliefs about the subordination/submission/complementarianism of of women.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi Martin PC - I freely admit that myth is not my strong point, and that my reading in the theology that embraces myth is miniscule.

So I'm happy to be enlightened and educated in this area.

However, let me hazard a definition of myth for our purposes 'a story that validates a worldview, occuring outside human time'

Please do tell me what's wrong with my definition.

But if that works for you, the question is whether the 'myth' of Genesis (or indeed the rest of the Bible which follows) ever comes into human time, becoming historical in the 'within human time' sense. My understanding is that some try to make the transition from 'myth' to history at the start of Genesis 12. I earlier gave some reasons why I don't think such a split in the Genesis narrative can be maintained.

Now that brings us to the key question - what would someone need to do, to make it clear that they thought a potentially mythical story was not mythical? What would Jesus, Peter and Paul have to say, to show they think the events of Genesis 1-11 occurred within human time?

Let's take the example of Peter and the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago while the ark was being built. Peter tells us that Jesus went and preached to them, after dying for our sins. It seems to me, that Peter clearly believes that Jesus died in human time. I think he's saying that Jesus then went to the dead spirits of the people who disobeyed in Noah's day (in the world of Adam-Noah ) and preached to them. That surely makes those people real people who disobeyed in human time, since Jesus is now preaching to them in real human time.

I gave other examples earlier. You might not like this example, or any of my examples. But if you don't like them, I'd like to know why. The key is to work out the criteria here: what could the New Testament authors have said to make it clear that they think Genesis 1-11 happened in real human time? Once we've got an answer to that question, then we can more easily debate whether Genesis is myth.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Hawk:
I would echo MikeRussell's surprise at the argument you quoted. I certainly have never come across anyone who claims that men and women are not both equally created in the image of God, despite their beliefs about the subordination/submission/complementarianism of of women.

---

As I said, I don't think this is stated explicitly by complementarians so much as being where one ends up by joining up complementarian beliefs. I am not an expert and that's probably another dead horse, but the book I referred to makes a good case for my assertion.

I raised the point because MikeRussell quoted Jensen and insists on "rule" as a defining characteristic of what it means to be human. In my experience, defining issues of faith largely in terms of authority leads to authoritarianism in many other areas, too.

[ETA: what I am sure of is that many complementarians would reject a woman's entitlement to "rule", at least in some areas. Which, if they followed MikeRussell's definition of what it means to be human, would call woman's humanity into question...]

[ 03. February 2011, 10:36: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Mike, I'm not sure I represent any particular 'school'. Other than that of CS Lewis's 'Mere Christianity'.

I have moved away from a very literal approach, though, to one that takes account of myth, metaphor and the ideas of 'kenosis' that Anglican Brat has outlined.

Hence, I don't find a problem with accepting the full divinity of our Lord as well as his full humanity and that he would have operated within a first century cosmology.

I'm no expert on Rabbinical writings, but from what I can see, even the Jews in the first century, and way into medieval times, were less fixated with the literal truth of some of the OT narratives. Of course, Judaism was as influenced by the Enlightenment as Christianity was.

But it strikes me that it is YOU who are operating in Enlightenment and Modernist terms here ... trying to impose post-Enlightenment and Modernist views of history and science onto the OT. And because you can't make them fit neatly, you go off into speculation about parallel universes and all sorts of esoteric things.

That's the issue I have with the kind of overly literal approach that you appear to be taking. Rather than bolstering your position you end up by undermining it.

Augustine certainly didn't take the Genesis stories at face-value and interpret them in a woodenly literal way. And you can take some of the writings of the Reformers to suggest that they didn't always take a highly literal approach either.

It seems to me that you are applying a 19th century B B Warfield style hermeneutic and interpretative framework .. although if you read some of the original 'fundamentalists' carefully you'll find that some of the more Calvinistic ones were quite happy to accept evolution ... and indeed, to interpret it in Calvinistic/deterministic terms.

Peter (or whoever it was who wrote his Epistles ) may have taken the stories of Noah etc literally - but then again, the writer may have been using them as exemplars from the 'myth-kitty' - the tradition they'd all inherited.

I could tell you a story about Robin Hood, for instance, but that needn't imply that I believe that he was an actual historical figure.

Personally, I do believe that Abraham, the Patriarchs, probably King David and other OT figures were living, breathing, historical figures. But I'm equally comfortable with there being 'mythic' elements in the narratives.

I know that the Genesis 1-11 and Post-chapter 12 dichotomy is too neat. But I would suggest that mythic elements persist after Chapter 12. Which doesn't make it any the less 'true' in the theological sense.

Am I making sense?
 

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Posted by goperryrevs (# 13504) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
My understanding is that some try to make the transition from 'myth' to history at the start of Genesis 12. I earlier gave some reasons why I don't think such a split in the Genesis narrative can be maintained.

---

There are brainier minds than mine on this thread, but just to engage with this one point:

As far as I see it, rather than a sudden cut-off, where myth becomes history, it's more realistic to see that some parts are myth, and some parts are history, all the way through to the New Testament. Thus, I read the NT as 98% history, 2% myth, and Genesis as 98% myth, 2% history. The books in-between have different ratios, dependent on a number of factors. Someone like David is around the 50:50 mark.

And others have made this point before, but I think it's good to reiterate that Myth is just as valuable as History, but for different reasons.
 

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Posted by The Great Gumby (# 10989) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Hi Martin PC - I freely admit that myth is not my strong point, and that my reading in the theology that embraces myth is miniscule.

So I'm happy to be enlightened and educated in this area.

However, let me hazard a definition of myth for our purposes 'a story that validates a worldview, occuring outside human time'

---

I'll jump in here, because asking Martin for a clear, unambiguous statement of what anything means is unlikely to be very productive. I'd cautiously agree with the first part, although I'm uneasy about the idea that it validates a worldview without more detail about what that might mean, and the second part seems entirely inaccurate, unless you apply some pretty idiosyncratic definitions to the words.

I'd prefer "a story, often in a highly stylised form, told to illustrate or explain a wider truth." To me, for example, the true message of the creation myth in Genesis isn't to watch out for snakes, but an expression of our imperfections as a race, and a deep sense that things shouldn't be like this.
 

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Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :
 
MikeRussell

Well, definitions are useful, so what are we talking about with myth? The OED describes it as: "A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something." It describes mythos as: "an ideology, a set of beliefs (personal or collective)" and relates it to the verb form "To show, reveal, demonstrate."

You have added the bit about occurring outside time, but I am not sure what you mean by this. I would dispute that myth necessarily occurs in a timeless setting, often it is an attempt to explain or demonstrate the meaning or deeper 'reality' behind events that occurred within a specific time period. But often, such as with Genesis, it uses legendary time (i.e - an undefined pre-historical period that existed before 'known' history) as a context for this demonstration and explanation of truth and meaning. Perhaps this is what you mean by 'outside time'. For instance, Jesus used such a trope in his teaching. His parables existed outside historical time, they did not occur as historical events, (though they were set within Jesus' contemporary time). They were a form of myth, so why shouldn't the ancient writer(s) of Genesis have used similar methods to convey their beliefs?

Now, you ask, what would Jesus and the apostles have needed to say to clarify whether or not they personally believed the historicity or otherwise of the Genesis stories. The question places the burden of evidence on the non-literalist perspective. But I would argue that if you are going to reject all the evidence of rational observation and scientific theory, the burden of evidence should be on the literalist viewpoint. You should be answering the question, "What did Jesus or the writers of the NT say that makes you believe they thought the Genesis accounts were historical events rather than a similar form to demonstrate truth as his parables?" In my reading, I can see no sign that Jesus or the writers of the NT referred to the stories of Genesis in a different fashion to how they referred to, related and treated Jesus' parables.

If I were to accept the burden of evidence though, I would say that to clarify their position, they would have had to answer the question you are asking two thousand years later - a question that I don't think would have concerned them and would probably have confused them as to what you were asking, since historical truth as we understand it was not fully developed as a genre of literature or of understanding the world. But they would have had to date the Genesis accounts for instance, by referring to other known events to create an historical framework to fit the stories into, rather than just saying their equivilent of 'once upon a time'; which is, 'in those days', or 'in Noah's day' - which is a trope of myth, not history. To absolutely clear up the issue they would have had to present their understanding of Genesis in a similar fashion to Luke's beginning of his gospel. For instance if civilisations such as Egypt were being set up at the same time as Noah arrived - 4000BC, then this could have been mentioned - or the name of the Pharoah, or a neighbouring King, or an event that would date the stories to a particular period rather than just the amorphous 'before-time' that the beginnings of Genesis is set in. Of course this wasn't written, since they weren't trying to argue the historicity of Genesis, they accepted it as it was, and referred to it for truth and meaning of their beliefs.

[ 03. February 2011, 13:21: Message edited by: Hawk ]
 

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Posted by Anglican_Brat (# 12349) on :
 
One uses myth and narrative to articulate a point. To insist that it implies the historicity of the story is to miss the point, or rather to focus on the speck while ignoring the log.

Plato for example used the story of the person who escaped from the cave into the outer world to behold the shining light of the sun as an illustration of the person who breaks through from illusion into the awareness of true reality. The purpose of the story is not that actual people were chained in a cave in Greece 3000 years ago and one person actually managed to escape.

So of course Jesus used narrative and myth to illustrate deeper theological meanings to his audience. Many philosophers and religious leaders do the same thing. To insist that that necessarily implies that these stories are historical is to miss the point.

Much of our uncomfort with myth rests with our buying into certain modern biases that "scientific" and "historical" accounts of reality are preferable to myths and poetry. This bias was not shared by our ancient ancestors who saw stories as conveying divine meanings that strict historical accounts did not convey.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Let's take the example of Peter and the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago while the ark was being built. Peter tells us that Jesus went and preached to them, after dying for our sins. It seems to me, that Peter clearly believes that Jesus died in human time. I think he's saying that Jesus then went to the dead spirits of the people who disobeyed in Noah's day (in the world of Adam-Noah ) and preached to them. That surely makes those people real people who disobeyed in human time, since Jesus is now preaching to them in real human time.

---

Isn't a journey to the Underworld to speak with the dead one of the classic myths? I don't think traveling as a spirit to commune with the deceased can really be counted as happening "in human time".
 

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Posted by Anglican_Brat (# 12349) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by goperryrevs:

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
My understanding is that some try to make the transition from 'myth' to history at the start of Genesis 12. I earlier gave some reasons why I don't think such a split in the Genesis narrative can be maintained.

---

There are brainier minds than mine on this thread, but just to engage with this one point:

As far as I see it, rather than a sudden cut-off, where myth becomes history, it's more realistic to see that some parts are myth, and some parts are history, all the way through to the New Testament. Thus, I read the NT as 98% history, 2% myth, and Genesis as 98% myth, 2% history. The books in-between have different ratios, dependent on a number of factors. Someone like David is around the 50:50 mark.

And others have made this point before, but I think it's good to reiterate that Myth is just as valuable as History, but for different reasons.

---

Generally speaking, most of the Hebrew Bible up to the Prophetic writings tend to be viewed as mythical. The stories of David and Solomon are probably on the same level as King Arthur. There probably was a historical David but there is little archaelogical/literary evidence that confirms the specific details of the Old Testament text.

One could say that there is a kernel of historicity within many Old Testament narratives which overtime got laid with interpretation and elaboration. So I think it is possible that a group of slaves did escape from Egypt at one point in time and eventually mixed with the original inhabitants of Caanan. Over time, as generations gathered together, they developed stories to try to explain where they came from. What we have in the Hebrew Bible today is the result of generations of passing down that oral story over time. In that process, certain authors modified and shaped that story to address their own contemporary questions.

Even in the New Testament, which I agree is generally seen as more "historical" than the Old, is influenced by this process. There are parts of the Gospels where it makes sense that the writer was using this story to address a contemporary issue of the early Christian church (I'm thinking of the verse where Jesus talks about a person offending another in church and how to reconcile the two, the church did not exist until Pentecost, so it makes sense to me that that was the case of the writer putting words to Jesus' lips to address a contemporary situation of his time).
 

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Posted by goperryrevs (# 13504) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Anglican_Brat:
Even in the New Testament, which I agree is generally seen as more "historical" than the Old, is influenced by this process. There are parts of the Gospels where it makes sense that the writer was using this story to address a contemporary issue of the early Christian church (I'm thinking of the verse where Jesus talks about a person offending another in church and how to reconcile the two, the church did not exist until Pentecost, so it makes sense to me that that was the case of the writer putting words to Jesus' lips to address a contemporary situation of his time).

---

I think the most obviously mythological part of the NT is the temptation in the desert.

Do I think Jesus went into the wilderness to prepare himself prior to his ministry? Yes. As for the details - 40 days (very symbolic), and the discourse with Satan, not so sure. I'm happy if it did happen like that, but I think it's more likely to be a theological embellishment to give a context to Jesus' mission.

As I said though, I do think that the vast, vast majority of the gospels is 'how it happened', from the point of view of the evangelists.
 

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Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on :
 
Basically I am in agreement with what Anglican Brat has posted in various places here.

I would give a bit more weight to historicity in the David era. My eveidence is the Succession Document which seems to be contemporary with the events it describes.

For what its worth I regard the anon Davidic writer as being responsible for colllecting up the disparate oral history of the tribes and writing them up as a Family Tree. This would have given religious unity to the political unity which David achieved and therefore gave the new nation a religious Epic round which all could unite.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by shamwari:

I would give a bit more weight to historicity in the David era.

---

If the sequence from Exodus to Kings isn't historical, it was edited by people who have an essentially modern idea of technological and social and military development.
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Could you elaborate on that, Ken? I'm not sure I follow you.

I remember you pointing out, once, that apparent anachronisms in the OT histories can be accounted for in a conservative way, rather than being dismissed in old-fashionably liberal fashion.
 

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Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on :
 
ken: The sequence from Exodus to Kings is far from being merely historical.

Books of Joshua and Judges cover the period.

But they have huge disagreements (prompted by theology) as to how the conquest was carried out.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Gamaliel:
Could you elaborate on that, Ken? I'm not sure I follow you.

---

Horses. No-one rides horses in the Pentateuch. Camels for the desert and donkeys for the mountains. You don't get horseriding until near the end of Kings, in Hezekiahs time. In David's time kings can ride mules. What self-respecting king or price would have been seen dead on a mule or donkey in post-exilic times?

Philistines. Brushing aside for the moment the anachronistic reference to Abimelech as "King of the Philistines" - which I think is probably a later reference to the land that later became Philistia, just as sometimes people call southern Britain "England" when talking about Roman times before the English got here - and why would an early Philistine have a Cananite name like Abimelech anyway? - and what would they be doing running things in Beersheba? - there are no Philistines in the Holy Land in Patriarchal times.

They are (correctly, according to our idea of history) described as from Capthor (which is somewhere over the sea to the north west - possibly Cyprus or Crete) But when the Exocud happens there are Philistines in the way and Israel has to go round them. And from about half-way through Judges to the begining of the book of Kings they are the main military enemies of Israel. Then, for the rest of Kings, they are there, mostly harmless and either friendly to or subject to Judah - until Hezekiah rebels against the Assyirians and goes and whops the Philistines.

The Philistines turned up in the Gaza area about 1185 BC after having fought against Ramses III. They are almost certainly part of the great invasion of the Sea Peoples who fought the Egyptians between about 1220 and 1180 BC, and then went on to destroy (or perhaps benefit for the destruction of) the Hittites and the Mittani and other kingdoms - basically the end of the Bronze Age and begining of what later got called the archaic dark ages. Reading between the lines (it is in the text but they don't go out of their way to point it out) the inhabitants of Canaan for most of Biblical history, including the Hebrews, are are actually semi-independent tributaries of Egypt up till about halfway through 1 Kings (when the Assyrians take over) Egypt was hit hard by the Sea Peoples and lost control of Sinai and Canaan from about 1200/1180 to some time in the 10th century BC. So if there was a time when Hebrews and Philistines could freely move around massacring each other without getting up the noses of the Pharaoh it was then. And Kings chapter 9 claims that a Pharaoh attacked Gezer, a border town between Philistines and Hebrews, and gave the city to Solomon - in other words that is the Egyptians re-asserting their general overlordship in southern Canaan, and Solomon is their ally (they would have looked on him as a vassal of course)

The events of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Samuel, and the first few chapters of Kings, whether historical or not, are set in the period between about 1200 and 900 BC, and in a political situation which agrees with our current view of those times - Egypt in eclipse, Assyria not yet important (they turn up in 2 Kings 15), a historically brief impoirtance for the Arameans of Damascus, but basically the small kingdoms of southern Canaan - five Philistine cities, Judah, Moab, Edom and assorted city states - are pretty much left to themselves.

Military technology too. In the middle part of Genesis men fight on foot. The first mention of a chariot is when Joseph goes to Egypt. But between the arrival in Egypt and about most of the way though the book of Kings there are chariots used in warfare - up to about the time of King Hezekiah at the latest. That is exactly contemporary with the ewarliest know depictions of large nbodies of cavalry in inscriptions. There are plenty of mentions of chariots after than in the Bible but no-one is depicted as fighting from them - they are ceremonial or just used as a poetic reference to warfare. (The Persians did try to revive chariots in warfare a few times but they were impressive rather than effective)

Iron. No iron industry in the Pentateuch. When the people get back to the Promised Land they hear of "chariots of iron". Which are scary high-tech superweapons they can't fight against. Industrial iron production from ore is usually supposed to have started among the Hittites, but it didn't spread to Syria until the early 12th centiury BC, when it came in from two directions - in the neo-Hittite city states of northern Syria like Carcemish (which were likely either old trading colonies of the Hitties now cut off from their empire, or Syrian cities that accepted many refugees from the collapsing Empire) and from the Sea Peoples - such as the Philistines - who either nicked the technology from the Hittites or had learned it anyway seeing as some of them came from those parts. Other people made things out of iron, but didn't seem to get it form ore on a large scale till the 12th century BC. In Exodus and Joshua and Judges and Samuel the Hebrews turn up in southern Canaan and find everybody else has iron-working technology - the Philistines on the coast, the Phoenicians and Syrians to their north - but they don't.

1 Samuel 13.19-20 "Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears: But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock." That's a story that - historical or not - only makes sense in the late 12th century BC and for a few generations after. Earlier than that, ordinary farmers would not have dreamed of using iron - iron! - for agricultural implements. It would be like modern farmers using atomic tractors. But much later, and every village in the Middle East would have had its own smith. There would be nothing strange in it at all.

Anyway, that went on a bit. And I've said similar stuff before at similar tedious length. But, seriously, whatever the historicity of the narratives, the settings of the main historical stream of the OT - Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings - fit our current ideas of the historical and technological developments in the six centuries or so from the end fo the Bronze Age to the rise of the Persian Empire.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
First class Ken, thanks.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by ken:
1 Samuel 13.19-20 "Now there was no smith found throughout all the land of Israel: for the Philistines said, Lest the Hebrews make them swords or spears: But all the Israelites went down to the Philistines, to sharpen every man his share, and his coulter, and his axe, and his mattock." That's a story that - historical or not - only makes sense in the late 12th century BC and for a few generations after. Earlier than that, ordinary farmers would not have dreamed of using iron - iron! - for agricultural implements. It would be like modern farmers using atomic tractors. But much later, and every village in the Middle East would have had its own smith. There would be nothing strange in it at all.

---

That's a bit of a modern misunderstanding. Before the Iron Age people already knew about iron. What they knew was "it's no damn good!" - about as heavy as bronze and either so soft it won't keep an edge or so brittle it shatters easily. It was figuring out how to work iron to avoid these problems that made the material useful. So rather than regarding iron tools as "atomic tractors", a bronze age audience would regard iron tools more like "tractors made of cheese".

In other words it's detail that rings true, but for the opposite reason of the one you state.

On the broader topic, a similar level of historical accuracy can be found in the Iliad (Nestor's cup, Odysseus' boar-tusk helmet, the populated centers listed in the Catalogue of Ships), but that doesn't make it an accurate history or prove the literal existence of Zeus or Aphrodite.
 

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Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Crœsos:
On the broader topic, a similar level of historical accuracy can be found in the Iliad (Nestor's cup, Odysseus' boar-tusk helmet, the populated centers listed in the Catalogue of Ships), but that doesn't make it an accurate history or prove the literal existence of Zeus or Aphrodite.

---

The historical accuracy of the Iliad is patchy. Achilles offers a lump of iron as a prize in book 23 - enough to keep the victor's shepherd and ploughman in iron for five years. In book 4, however, Pandarus is using an arrow with an iron head. Ajax and Hector have tower shields, which fit depictions of Mycenaean shields, but everyone else uses round shields. There are also inconsistencies in the numbers of horses used on chariots, and in book 10 there are references to heros as horsemen. (Source: Knox' introduction to the Fagles translation.) Nestor's handled cup and Odysseus' boar-tusk helmet are actually atypical - most artifacts mentioned in the text are not so archaic (and Nestor's cup doesn't have the right number of handles either).
The presence in the Iliad of historical survivals can be explained by their function in an long oral poem, with its roots in improvisatory practice.
I don't know anything about the historical localisation of the OT beyond what Ken's just said. But I don't think anyone has ever suggested that there's a substratum in which the stories were oral poetry. Also, I can't think of any set-piece descriptions of artifacts in Genesis.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Mike

Your examples are all predicated on thinking that can't work. Thinking that ... isn't. The examples can't validate the thinking. The thinking spawns the examples. It's inverted, closed. Circular and it cannot be squared. Logos isn't mythos.

Hawk's analysis is excellent. Ken's and Croesos' contributions. Gamaliel's. Anglican Brat's.

You can't stand here Mike.

You don't speak the language of discourse, the dialectic. You will disappear without trace and go and lick your wounds for decades before you realise, if ever in this life, that no matter what they dispositionally believe, their thinking is superior.

Mine is simply parsimonious. Which makes it automatically superior to yours:

"Let's take the example of Peter and the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago while the ark was being built. Peter tells us that Jesus went and preached to them, after dying for our sins. It seems to me, that Peter clearly believes that Jesus died in human time. I think he's saying that Jesus then went to the dead spirits of the people who disobeyed in Noah's day (in the world of Adam-Noah ) and preached to them. That surely makes those people real people who disobeyed in human time, since Jesus is now preaching to them in real human time."

You even appear to be alluding - unclearly, ambiguously - to Jesus travelling back through time after death. Why ? May be not.

Furthermore the spirits aren't dead they are alive. And they were never human. Not parsimoniously.

But you cannot be challenged on this or anything else. The concept of parsimony is alien to you. You will ALWAYS have a 'yeah but'.

You cannot see the weirdness, the questions begging in your imparsimonious interpretation. And you're too proud to ask. To stay with it come what might.

Too frightened.

Believe me. I've been you. And I'm NEVER wrong. You can't do this Mike.

I fear to say that you can't even pray about it.

But I do.

I've been coming here for oooh 12 years Mike and only since doing battle with YECists elsewhere in the past year have I been able to shake off Intelligent Design.

Only in the past couple of months have I realised what applies to YEC applies to the myth of The Flood.

Almighty God's myth.

In between I realised God's pragmatism in applying the Sabbath retrospectively.

And NONE of that makes me a theological liberal, antinomian, lawless in sexual matters. I take the impossible standard of the beatitudes completely seriously.

Peter and even Jesus may have believed every word of the Tanakh. As literally, as woodenly as any YECist today. But NOT with their perverted anti-scientific thinking. Science, history, forensics, even law didn't exist as we know it.

They didn't have a conflict between logos and mythos. Neither do 'we' here. You do. That's a MODERN phenomenon, like 'weak' YECism.

It's a blip that will pass.

I'm conservative, neo-orthodox. Intellectually liberal as there is no other way to be, they are synonyms to a huge degree of overlap. I horrify theological liberals here as I take God's pragmatism to an extreme degree: He IS God the Killer, not just happy to be wrongly assumed to be until we grow up.

So where the narratives could move behind the scenes of science, as Eden could, I don't DEMAND a materialistic rationalization as the athiest Christians here do. But I find I couldn't care less really.

Adam's sin isn't mine. MINE are mine. I am truly not liberal as I know that every human heart is deceitful above all things and yeah desperately wicked. That we are fallen. Depraved. Broken. Fearful. Sick. Murderous. I ain't no liberal Mike.

There is NO threat in thinking to faith Mike. On the contrary. And then some. Unreason undermines faith. Replaces it. Prevents it.

Lord illuminate us.

Martin
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
I hope you guys can have some patience while I prepare youth group, and church. I'll be quieter for a day or two.

But, gee, Martin, I can't help it: What's with your 'I'm never wrong' caper?

It seems especially odd in a post which asserts that I (MikeRussell) will never admit that I'm wrong.

FWIW, let me say: I'm wrong on the trees staying above the level of the Flood, that's just one of the changes in my thinking through this discourse. Not to mention being very likely to abandon the idea that a 30 cubit boat could float in 15 cubits of water. The list will no doubt be extended, but I must go.

But for now, unless you want to withdraw, let me mention that you'll probably make it as an illustration in one of my future sermons - It's Martin "I'm never wrong" PC.

Despite this remarkable outburst, I'm very thankful for the interaction so far, including Martin's. I'm finding it quite helpful.

You might like to pray for my youth Bible study kids - we had 20 boys and 2 girls last fortnight. Who know what this evening will bring.....
 

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Posted by pjkirk (# 10997) on :
 
If you stick around a while, you'll get used to Martin. Well, maybe.

Nice to see some flexibility in your thoughts....the assumption for people coming in is probably that this is lacking, since in most it is.

Good luck w/ the kids...I know I couldn't cope w/ it.
 

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Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :
 
FWIW MikeRussell, I value your contributions and have enjoyed your posts. While I disagree with your conclusions I also reject Martin's belief that you don't fit here, or can't debate with us. Don't take his comments to heart, and stick with us. I disagree with your proposal but I know very well my thinking is not superior to anyone's and I remember that I could learn from you just as much as you can learn from us. (And FWIW I suspect much of Martin's post could be tongue in cheek - especially his 'I'm NEVER wrong')

All the best and God's blessing for the kids today. Youth work is hard but very rewarding I know. What age are they?
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Don't tell Mike guys, but reverse psychology can work WONDERS. And it's nice to see you all being nice to Mike.

I'll pray for yours Mike if you pray for mine:

50 assorted heroin, cocaine, base users, alcoholics, failed economic migrants, prostitutes, pimps, disproportionately Roman Catholic, one or two Muslims sometimes three, a Hindu, Travellers, Roma, bipolars, paranoid schizophrenes, monopolars ages 16 to 77, gay and straight tonight for dinner.

The record staying for the 'God slot' two weeks ago was 19. But Frankie's staying in his castle a hundred yards away for a few months and his retinue tend to follow.
 

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Posted by Louise (# 30) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
Mike

Your examples are all predicated on thinking that can't work. Thinking that ... isn't. The examples can't validate the thinking. The thinking spawns the examples. It's inverted, closed. Circular and it cannot be squared. Logos isn't mythos.

Hawk's analysis is excellent. Ken's and Croesos' contributions. Gamaliel's. Anglican Brat's.

You can't stand here Mike.

You don't speak the language of discourse, the dialectic. You will disappear without trace and go and lick your wounds for decades before you realise, if ever in this life, that no matter what they dispositionally believe, their thinking is superior.

Mine is simply parsimonious. Which makes it automatically superior to yours:

"Let's take the example of Peter and the spirits in prison who disobeyed long ago while the ark was being built. Peter tells us that Jesus went and preached to them, after dying for our sins. It seems to me, that Peter clearly believes that Jesus died in human time. I think he's saying that Jesus then went to the dead spirits of the people who disobeyed in Noah's day (in the world of Adam-Noah ) and preached to them. That surely makes those people real people who disobeyed in human time, since Jesus is now preaching to them in real human time."

You even appear to be alluding - unclearly, ambiguously - to Jesus travelling back through time after death. Why ? May be not.

Furthermore the spirits aren't dead they are alive. And they were never human. Not parsimoniously.

But you cannot be challenged on this or anything else. The concept of parsimony is alien to you. You will ALWAYS have a 'yeah but'.

You cannot see the weirdness, the questions begging in your imparsimonious interpretation. And you're too proud to ask. To stay with it come what might.

Too frightened.

Believe me. I've been you. And I'm NEVER wrong. You can't do this Mike.

I fear to say that you can't even pray about it.

But I do.

I've been coming here for oooh 12 years Mike and only since doing battle with YECists elsewhere in the past year have I been able to shake off Intelligent Design.

Only in the past couple of months have I realised what applies to YEC applies to the myth of The Flood.

Almighty God's myth.

In between I realised God's pragmatism in applying the Sabbath retrospectively.

And NONE of that makes me a theological liberal, antinomian, lawless in sexual matters. I take the impossible standard of the beatitudes completely seriously.

Peter and even Jesus may have believed every word of the Tanakh. As literally, as woodenly as any YECist today. But NOT with their perverted anti-scientific thinking. Science, history, forensics, even law didn't exist as we know it.

They didn't have a conflict between logos and mythos. Neither do 'we' here. You do. That's a MODERN phenomenon, like 'weak' YECism.

It's a blip that will pass.

I'm conservative, neo-orthodox. Intellectually liberal as there is no other way to be, they are synonyms to a huge degree of overlap. I horrify theological liberals here as I take God's pragmatism to an extreme degree: He IS God the Killer, not just happy to be wrongly assumed to be until we grow up.

So where the narratives could move behind the scenes of science, as Eden could, I don't DEMAND a materialistic rationalization as the athiest Christians here do. But I find I couldn't care less really.

Adam's sin isn't mine. MINE are mine. I am truly not liberal as I know that every human heart is deceitful above all things and yeah desperately wicked. That we are fallen. Depraved. Broken. Fearful. Sick. Murderous. I ain't no liberal Mike.

There is NO threat in thinking to faith Mike. On the contrary. And then some. Unreason undermines faith. Replaces it. Prevents it.

Lord illuminate us.

Martin

---

Hosting

I apologise for the delay in dealing with this post, due to my conferring with the admins about it.

Martin PC Not, while your style of posting is sometimes a bit opaque, the rules of the boards are very clear. C3 is that personal attacks must be made on the Hell board and not outside it and C4 is "If you must get personal, take it to Hell"

This post with its series of negative 'You' 'You' 'You' assertions crosses those boundaries. Posts of this sort making negative personal assertions about another poster should only be made on the Hell board.

I have in the past, Martin, given a personal statement you made on this board about another poster the benefit of the doubt, because it could be interpreted as a back handed compliment, but you are on notice now that I am tightening things up. If you post personal comments on other posters which are not unambiguously neutral or positive, I will count them as C3 or C4 violations.

If you want to get personal about other posters and what you suppose to be their failings, you must do so on the Hell board and not here.

Please also take personal chat not related to the thread to PMs (personal messages) or to suitable threads for sharing and chatting in All Saints.

If you want to query this ruling, then please take it to The Styx

Many thanks
Louise
Dead Horses Host


hosting off

[ 05. February 2011, 20:58: Message edited by: Louise ]
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Ma'am.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Well hi to all again. I prayed for your bunch, Martin - I'm very impressed that you gather such a crowd, in such a fashion as you describe.

The 'Ship of Fools' site rules on personal negative attacks are interesting. I don't believe that who we are personally - our character - can be separated from our theological positions. Jesus certainly thought there was a time to move beyond the theological debate to personal rebuke. So I understand that such a move can be useful. Working out the best rules for internet debate is challenging. Living within those rules is also challenging. Anyway, let's move on.

On the historicity of the OT, I commend Ken's defence of the historical setting post-Genesis, and I would note that I calculate my chronology (including my date for Adam) with an Exodus around 1270 BC, following Kenneth Kitchen. This 1270 date sits well with the sort of commentary Ken was making. Some (literalists) would see my approach as being unfaithful to 1 Kings 6:1, and the 480 years mentioned there, but the number of '40 year' symoblic periods mentioned in the era of the judges is high, and this 480 years can be taken as symbolising twelve 40 year periods. (With Kitchen, I go for around 300 years having passed, rather than 480)

But turning back to the myth discussion, I concede that I should abandon the 'outside time' portion of my definition of myth.

But on reflection, perhaps the best line of argument does not lie with the definition. The main argument against my position on Genesis seems to be that I am turning Genesis into a kind of text it isn't.

In reply, I want to drill down from the general discussion of myth to the particular question of whether the genealogies of Genesis 5, 11 can be used for chronological purposes. My evidence that they should be used for chronology includes a key point I made in passing earlier: Jewish pre-Christ commentators and early Christian commentators considered that the Genesis 5, 11 genealogies should be used for chronological purposes. The reference I've got for that is E. Merrill, "Chronology," Dictionary of the Old Testament Pentateuch: 117-118.

That is to say, in NT times, the way I am treating Genesis 5 and 11 was precisely the mainstream.
So yes, of course I concede that modern understandings of history and science were unknown to the Genesis author(s)/editor(s). But that does not negate this main point I am making: Jesus and the New Testament should be taken as the Genesis interpreters par-excellence. And from what we know, their disposition would have been to side with me on this question of chronology.

So the burden of proof rests on those who would show that Jesus and the apostles would reject the use of the Genesis genealogies to calculate chronology.

Or, let me put the challenge differently: Please find a strand of historical interpretation of Genesis 5, 11 (pre-1800 AD) that denies those genealogies could be used for chronology.
If you can't find such a strand, I'd say you have no case against the way I use those passages.
 

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Posted by pjkirk (# 10997) on :
 
Personal attacks are allowed - they're just segregated to one section of the forums. It may seem odd to you (I would find that worrisome but for your avoiding them), but it has worked for years here.

You claim that NT-era use of these texts as chronologies supports your use of them. It seems to me that when these oral histories were put to text, even assuming as late as 650BC or so, the character of judaism was vastly different from early NT, and the progression of society, if you will, was at a far earlier stage than when Jesus was alive. So I think you need to show that they viewed these texts in this way pre-exile/whenever to carry your point (assuming that's even possible).
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Or, let me put the challenge differently: Please find a strand of historical interpretation of Genesis 5, 11 (pre-1800 AD) that denies those genealogies could be used for chronology.
If you can't find such a strand, I'd say you have no case against the way I use those passages.

---

The case I have against the way you use those passages is that it involves inventing a parellel race of non-human humans, something for which there is no Scriptural evidence whatsoever - an objection I've raised which you are persistently seeking to brush under the carpet.

You may have preserved the gnat of rigourously correct Gen 5-11 genealogies, but to do so you have swallowed a rather fat camel of unsupported assumptions which raise far more problems than they solve. The price of your solution is too high.
 

---

Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
...whether the genealogies of Genesis 5, 11 can be used for chronological purposes. My evidence that they should be used for chronology includes a key point I made in passing earlier: Jewish pre-Christ commentators and early Christian commentators considered that the Genesis 5, 11 genealogies should be used for chronological purposes. The reference I've got for that is E. Merrill, "Chronology," Dictionary of the Old Testament Pentateuch: 117-118.

---

Well, I don't have a copy of that article so would you be able to elaborate on the evidence for Merrill's argument please?

In the meantime, in response, I would point out that scholarly attempts to literally calculate chronology from the point of creation using the scriptural figures did not begin until well into the second century AD, with Jewish and early Christian writers attempting this method. We have no extant writings regarding earlier attempts to calculate chronology biblically. And there is no scriptural evidence that shows any attempt of Jesus or the apostles to add the figures in the genealogies up to calculate the date.

I would also point out that attempts to calculate chronology runs into massive problems due to the large differences in the texts. The differences show that there were never any agreed figures for the ages of the pre-historical characters. The ages of the Patriarchs from Adam to Terah are generally 100 years older in the Septuagint than in the Hebrew text. Calculating the flood from the given numbers in the genealogies gives a date of 1656 AM (after creation) in the Hebrew 'Masoretic' text, 1307 AM in the Samaritan and 2242 AM in the Septuagint. There are more contradictions. These show that the figures aren't important, and there is much evidence that the figures were subject to revisions and rewritings up until the time of Jesus.

Your comment about pre-Christ Jewish scholars is interesting as the evidence we have is that there was a significant trend to consider the chronology of the scriptures to be symbolic rather than historical. Why else would the book of Jubilees have been written around the second century BCE, which rewrites the books of Genesis and Exodus 1-14, measuring time in 'jubilees' or periods of exactly 49 years, and ends with the entry of Israel into Canaan exactly 50 jubilees after creation - a new date of 2450 AM. Like the Samaritan text, this dates the flood to 1307 AM. Was this new revelation - or evidence of a trend to describe the history of the world in symbolic figures rather than literal numbers of years. This attitude of the Israelite scholars in playing fast and loose with the numbers doesn't give the reader confidence in the accurate historicity of the various numbers given.

The evidence for the symbolism of the figures is striking, and when compared to neigbouring civilisations, it becomes more obvious still. Mesopotamian legends from the ancient world have kings at the beginning of the world living for 36,000 years or more, and eight kings last 241,000 years down to the flood. These legends seem to point to a use of numbers when describing genealogies that was exagerated and symbolic rather than literal - a trend prevalent throughout the ancient world.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
That is to say, in NT times, the way I am treating Genesis 5 and 11 was precisely the mainstream.
So yes, of course I concede that modern understandings of history and science were unknown to the Genesis author(s)/editor(s). But that does not negate this main point I am making: Jesus and the New Testament should be taken as the Genesis interpreters par-excellence. And from what we know, their disposition would have been to side with me on this question of chronology.

So the burden of proof rests on those who would show that Jesus and the apostles would reject the use of the Genesis genealogies to calculate chronology.

Or, let me put the challenge differently: Please find a strand of historical interpretation of Genesis 5, 11 (pre-1800 AD) that denies those genealogies could be used for chronology.
If you can't find such a strand, I'd say you have no case against the way I use those passages.

---

If your standard is maintaining a pre-modern interpretation of history, then why not simply say the Universe is six thousand years old (or ten thousand years old, or whatever) and be done with it? You certainly can't find "a strand of historical interpretation of Genesis 5, 11 (pre-1800 AD)" that can justify the much older age of the Universe posited by modern observations.

I think this gets at part of the problem. You claim your position is based on "an acceptance of mainstream history and science", yet you seem to reject science outright. Despite its vernacular use, "science" is not a collection of facts but rather a methodology used to separate fact from fiction on the basis of evidence. Just making up stuff because it's convenient to your pet hypothesis is intensely unscientific.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
... I would note that I calculate my chronology (including my date for Adam) with an Exodus around 1270 BC, following Kenneth Kitchen. This 1270 date sits well with the sort of commentary Ken was making. Some (literalists) would see my approach as being unfaithful to 1 Kings 6:1, and the 480 years mentioned there, but the number of '40 year' symoblic periods mentioned in the era of the judges is high, and this 480 years can be taken as symbolising twelve 40 year periods. (With Kitchen, I go for around 300 years having passed, rather than 480)

---

Yes. The way to "save the phenomenon" of OT dating and make it fit our idea of historical dates is to have a short Judges. Which I think is in fact very valid from the literal text - when the number of generations seems to disagree with the numbers of years given, go for the generations. In Ruth (which I'd fully accept is a story written much later to explain David's ancestry), and also the traditions that got into the NT geneaologies, Boaz is portrayed as the first generation born in the land, the son of Salmon (who was probably meant to be one of the spies sent to Jericho, which is why Rahab is Boaz's mother - this is a romantic love story - there are some in the Bible you just have to read between the lines.

Now Boaz and Ruth are depicted as David's great-grandparents (Boaz, Obed, Jesse, David). So even if you assume that Boaz is much older than Ruth (which it doesn't in fact say anywhere) and that Jesse was getting on a bit when David was born (which seems likley as he is at least the eights surviving child) you can't make the period of the Judges much more than 150 years and it could be as little as 100. So I'd contend that the sections of Judges are meant to be overlapping in time, not one after the other, and that the events of Samuel happen not long after. Ruth might have met Rahab as an old women, and Hannah might have met Ruth.

(Again, this isn't about historicity - though it is a pre-requisite of historicity, it is neccessary but not sufficient for it - its about working out what the literal meaning in fact is, what did the redactors intend readers to understand by what they worote)

quote:

---

That is to say, in NT times, the way I am treating Genesis 5 and 11 was precisely the mainstream.

---

That's true of course.
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
But postulating some kind of parallel universe in order to make your data 'fit' certainly isn't mainstream ... nor would it have been back in NT times.

I'm with Croesos on this one. If you're going to develop more and more convoluted theories to make evidence fit a particular schema, then why not abandon 'modern' or 'postmodern' approaches altogether?

Ken makes some interesting points about OT chronology, certainly, and whilst people of a more liberal persuasion may not be convinced by his arguments, at least he isn't postulating solutions that aren't found or even hinted at in the scriptural texts themselves - which is something Eutychus has raised as an argument against your initial thesis.

And I'd say that it's an argument that holds.

To the extent that I'm confused as to why you're even bothering to postulate some of the more left-field views you've aired here.

It's perfectly possible to hold a conservative view of biblical chronologies and dating, as Ken demonstrates, without getting into the realms of whacky speculation.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Mike

There is NO proof against science. Against materialism. No evidence whatsoever. Well there is one ...

The fact that incarnate, FULLY human God HAD to believe (as we believe?) counter-scientific, counter-factual, non-, un-, anti- and a- historical narratives that may nonetheless be miraculously as true as it is possible to be whilst failing every test of evidence in court, as well as being 110% theologically valid, without denying the findings of science, does not provide us with ANYTHING except the astounding pragmatism of God as He demonstrated perfectly with the Sabbath.

Science CANNOT be disproved. Scientifically there was no Flood. There was no Eden. There were no multicentenarians. No Babel. You name it. It scientifically DIDN'T happen.

I bow the knee to there having been when God runs the movie on Judgement Day. If He does ... How did He answer Job ?

Scientifically Homo sapiens is at least a quarter of a million years old.

You cannot prove science wrong by pseudoscientifically trying to shoe-horn myth in to the scientific framework and then arrogate science. Steal it. Pervert it.

There is no onus on you to do the impossible. That would be cruel of us. Science has no onus but to itself.

Leave it alone.

And exercise faith.

Jesus did.

Jesus is the answer to everything. Everything important. Our alienation.

I sort of hope that He NEVER tells us, NEVER runs the movie. We have eternity to work it out, to watch and participate in the endless increase of His government.

In other words:

Just because Jesus, God in the flesh, God FULLY human believed - whatever that means - His ancestors' Holy Spirit inspired myths doesn't make them scientically true and doesn't make Him NOT true in EVERY regard.

I can't be the first person ever to say that, it's implicit in my knowledge of C.S.Lewis, but I am to you and I am in my limited experience of this site, but it's thanks to it in part that I can.

The gift of faith isn't TOUCHED by science. And vice-versa.

God is Mythos AND Logos.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@pjkirk

Demetrius the chronographer is 'almost certainly the earliest Jewish author we know to have written in Greek'. (P. Van der Horst, 'Jewish Literature: Historians and Poets', Dictionary of the New Testament Background, 580.)

He wrote about 200 B.C. and used the LXX as the basis of his biblical chronology. He placed Abraham's birth 3334 years from Adam's creation. (See also Merrill, 117, mentioned earlier.)

You can read page 118 of that article by going to amazon, searching looking up the dictionary, hitting 'look inside', and searching on chronology.

This might work:
http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Old-Testament-Pentateuch-Bible/dp/0830817816/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297131316&sr=8-1

I am unaware of any earlier extra-Biblical commentary in any language which speaks about Genesis 5, 11.

But in the absence of further evidence, it is not incumbent on me to prove that the understanding had stayed the same. It is incumbent on those who would argue that Demetrius' approach (and all who followed him) was a new departure.

@Eutychus
I'm not ignoring your challenge. Why don't you put your understanding of 'the first human' on the table. If you believe Adam was a real person (I think that's necessary theologically, due to Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 for example), and you believe in evolution, you have the same problem that you accuse me of having - a parallel race of 'non- human humans'

I challenge you to produce any schema with a real Adam and human evolution that isn't open to a charge of implying a parallel race of 'non-human humans'. If we assume that the Biblical Adam was Y-Chromosome Adam (ignoring the fact that mitochondrial Eve is dated c. 50k years earlier), immediately the problem arises as to what we will call the other Homo sapiens living around Adam at the time. Aren't those others a parallel race of non-human humans? How are you going to solve this problem, Eutychus?
Your problem, as I see it, is that you remain fixed to a definition of human that is purely biological. The only way out of this conundrum is to define humans as Homo sapiens PLUS a God-given soul.

@Hawk - My reference above shows that your claim on the calculation of chronologies is wrong by around 400 years.

I think it's been fairly well established that the MT should be preferred to the LXX and SP on the figures used to calculate the chronologies. Did you want to argue the point?

On the parallel documents with high lifespans for ancient kings, yes I'm aware of them. I think the biggest problem for assuming that the Genesis' ages are symbolic (by parallel) is that no one has produced a viable explanation for what all the numbers symbolise. You get guesses here and there, but it's widely acknowledged that no one has come even close.
What do the numbers mean then? The answer that makes most sense is they mean exactly what they say - this is how long the person lived. This is especially so because of the steady drift in age downward after the Flood. Jacob even puts his own age on his own lips in dialog. 'And Jacob said to Pharaoh, "The years of my pilgrimage are a hundred and thirty. My years have been few and difficult, and they do not equal the years of the pilgrimage of my fathers."'
This is quite different from the symbolism of the numbers 7, 12, 40 and so on, which is well established, and which I accept. (See my interaction with Ken).

@Croesos
My standard is not accepting a pre-modern version of history. I was defending my understanding of Genesis 5, 11 as the one which best fits the text, given historical interpretation.

I am not convinced that the Bible teaches anything about the age of our earth. This is partly because of the 'Framework interpretation' of Genesis 1, discussed above. It's also because I believe that if there was a literal six day creation of the earth, the referent is the world of perfection (the world of Adam through Noah), not our world. It is abundantly clear that our world is old. But my point is that I see no basis in the Scripture to argue that our world must be old. I see a strong basis for saying that Adam is 'young'.

@Ken

Well you've gone as far back as Exodus (and some of Genesis?) in supporting the Bible's historical background. Can you come with me as far as the Tower of Babel?
Could it be that Sumerian was the language scattered do you think? Are you aware of the interaction of Seely and DeWitt on the subject? (see my article) Do you accept that the Tower of Babel was a ziggurat? Is the event dateable?

@Gamaliel
At some point Ken has to decide if and where Genesis slips outside of being an historically viable narrative. If he says it does, he has to identify where in the narrative this change occurs. Such a change is hard to defend, since the narrative gives no obvious clues as to the change.

Post Genesis 12, it's very possible to have a 'non-wacky' conservative take on the chronologies. I don't think it's possible in Genesis 2-11.
I don't think it's possible to have a chronology with a 'young' Adam, and an old earth without the sort of stuff I'm proposing.

@Martin

I'm not sure what to say. I'm not trying to disprove science.


For your interest (back to the 'wacky'), I'm of the view that all the high-milk variety cattle on earth today are likely descended from cows who came out of the ark. God sent the 'non-evolved' higher-milk-quality cattle into our world so humans could do better in this world. That's why when you look at the major dairy cattle breeds, you can trace them all back at least to Europe, and in some cases closer still to the likely site of the ark.
 

---

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Why don't you put your understanding of 'the first human' on the table. If you believe Adam was a real person (I think that's necessary theologically, due to Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 for example), and you believe in evolution, you have the same problem that you accuse me of having - a parallel race of 'non- human humans'

I challenge you to produce any schema with a real Adam and human evolution that isn't open to a charge of implying a parallel race of 'non-human humans'.

---

Well, I don't have to put anything on the table, because I'm not defending any given hypothesis.

Way upthread I pointed out that one of your underlying assumptions is that we are not all descended from Adam (because according to you, God 'upgraded' non-human humanity to human shortly after the fall).

I think a fair number of people who believe in a literal Adam would find that unacceptable because their doctrine of original sin requires us to be his biological descendants. (I don't think you do believe that, and so I'm puzzled as to why you describe a literal Adam as "necessary theologically"; I think you mean "Jesus seemed to believe in a literal Adam and therefore so do I").

If you are however prepared to assume that we are not all biologically descended from Adam (which you seem to be), I think it's much easier to then assume the genealogies are representative rather than literal, potentially placing Adam a lot further back in time than you would have him (and thus explaining the 'human' behaviour, say, of Cro-Magnon man), than to assume two parallel worlds of concurrent humanity.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Mike. Yes you are. You are trying to arrogate science with pseudoscience, you are distorting the Logos with the Mythos and in so doing undermine the Mythos with the Logos.

You make God in denial - but for some reason can't go the whole hog and embrace YEC - and you proliferate entities. Been there. A frightfully 'modern' form of Aristotelianism. I make Him pragmatic. Which is even more dangerous left and right. Get postmodern baby.
 

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Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on :
 
Seldom have I read and enjoyed so much science fiction as on this thread.
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Mike, I still think you're coming at this in completely the wrong way and treating a pre-modern text in the same way as you would a modern history. Plenty of posters here have tried to point this out. Even conservative ones like Ken.

You wrote:

'At some point Ken has to decide if and where Genesis slips outside of being an historically viable narrative. If he says it does, he has to identify where in the narrative this change occurs. Such a change is hard to defend, since the narrative gives no obvious clues as to the change.'

Well, why should it? And why should we expect a neat cut-off point? I think Ken is simply saying that even if you don't take the OT stories as literally true, the background against which they are set is certainly reasonably accurate historically ie. Philistines living in Canaan at the time the Bible has them living there etc.

I take your point about the lack of apparent symbolism in some of the ages attributed to the Patriarchs and other figures - and that Jacob apparently believed that he wasn't going to live as long as he predecessors. But that isn't inconsistent with the 'myth' aspects we've been talking about. I get the impression of decreasing longevity the further we get away from the Creation story and the Flood ... but that doesn't imply that it has to be taken as literal historical fact.

The problem isn't Ken's, it seems to me, it's yours. Hence you have to keep introducing left-field ideas like milk bearing cows having to be introduced by direct divine intervention because the ones who were on the Ark wouldn't have been capable of the yields we subsequently find.



Dare I say it, there's something very binary, if not bi-polar, about your approach. Genesis can't be a mix of historical fact and myth. It has to be one or the other and not both.

I don't understand why it has to be as clear cut and sharp-edged as you seem to want it to be.
 

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Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on :
 
My comment above about this being scientific fiction was born of exasperation.

I am exasperated that theses which purport to have some biblical/scientific basis have neither in fact.

I am exasperated that folks treat these seriously and thereby fly in the face of all scholarship.

In my view Genesis 1 - X1 are mythological. Genesis 12-50 are legendry. And none of this is contemperaneous with the events the purport to chronicle.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
If we assume that the Biblical Adam was Y-Chromosome Adam

---

We can't. Even talking about it like that misses the point. Admittedly in this case the blame mostly lies with publicity-hungry science-writers who used terms like "Y-Chromosome Adam" and "Mitochondrial Eve", presumably knowing how misleading they were.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Awkward s[qu]ad that I am Gamaliel:

quote:

---

Genesis can't be a mix of historical fact and myth. It has to be one or the other and not both.

---

Why² ? Apart from the use of the word historical and all it means obviously. Genesis certainly isn't an historical document, it can't be historically, scientifically validated in its miraculous claims.

But why CAN'T it be fact - logos - and myth-os ?
 

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Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on :
 
It is mythos Martin

But who knows what you mean by mythos?

Some of us assume you mean fact
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Do any of us know what Martin means? Does Martin?

I think I know what he means when he talks about logos and mythos ...

But now I'm not so sure.

But my challenge to Mike Russell still stands. Why the binary divide, Mike? Why does the whole edifice have to tumble if we accept Genesis chs 1 - 11 as mythological and the rest as legendary (as shamwari does) or, as it would seem that Ken and I do, as a mix of legend and historically grounded events - or, at least, legendary events set against a definite historical context.

I'm not sure where I am on that continuum. Probably somewhere between Shamwari and Ken. But they can speak for themselves.

What I do know, though, is that appeal to pseudo-science ain't going to get us anywhere.
 

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Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Demetrius the chronographer is 'almost certainly the earliest Jewish author we know to have written in Greek'…You can read page 118 of that article by going to amazon, searching looking up the dictionary, hitting 'look inside', and searching on chronology.

This might work:
http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Old-Testament-Pentateuch-Bible/dp/0830817816/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297131316&sr=8-1

---

It doesn't since page 118 isn’t on the preview. Though I am interested, I suspect you are right and I am happy to concede this point. I would maintain my argument though using the points raised by others upthread, that just because some ancient scholars chose to use the figures literally (though this was only one strand of thought and significant others viewed them symbolically) that doesn't mean we are bound to do so as well. It is not a doctrine of my faith that I have to view the world pre-scientifically. I do not think following Christ demands my acceptance of archaic perspectives on history, physics, cosmology or the rest. We have come a long way in our understanding of the natural world and its past since then, and I believe God has led us here.

And the argument that Jesus also accepted the 'scientific' truths of his time and culture and so therefore his statements about these things were due to his divine knowledge, rather than his human understanding - that also doesn't hold water. Firstly I do not accept that it is definitively known that Jesus personally believed in the chronology literally, as his statements about this could be taken either way. But if He did then we have to remember that Jesus gave up many of his divine attributes in incarnation. He was, for instance, certainly not omnipresent during his ministry on earth. Therefore I do not accept your argument is valid that his divine omniscience of pre-history was maintained on earth, since there is no claim of this in the words of Jesus, and it was not argued or maintained by the early church (Philippians 2:7 is often used to show evidence that they argued the opposite, that he "made himself nothing," for instance).

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Why don't you put your understanding of 'the first human' on the table. If you believe Adam was a real person (I think that's necessary theologically, due to Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 for example), and you believe in evolution, you have the same problem that you accuse me of having - a parallel race of 'non- human humans'

---

I'm not sure that Adam was a real distinct individual. I don't think it's necessary to think so theologically either, especially if you accept that all of humanity has not directly ‘biologically’ inherited ‘Adam’s’ sin (as though it is something in the blood that taints us) – something you have already accepted in your own thought. The curse of Adam is the curse of humanity, not our relationship to a specific fallen individual. A close reading of Genesis 1 shows that 'adam' is a plural term – a term for humanity, rather than an individual whose given name was Adam. Genesis 1:27 reads “Let us make ‘adam’ in our own image…so God created ‘ha-adam’ in His image, in the image of God He created them… male and female He created them.” ‘Them’ is the subject, referred to as ‘adam’, both male and female. In this passage ‘adam’ is usually translated as ‘humanity’ or ‘mankind’ and ‘ha-adam’ translated as ‘mankind’ also.

Regarding the attempt to reconcile the theology of Genesis, with the evolutionary history of humanity, you rightly say that the attempt to view Adam as a distinct individual is problematic. You have seen this in your own attempt, finding yourself going down self-described ‘wacky’ paths to reconcile the two. Once abandoning this idea of God creating a distinct individual in a single day as opposed to God’s creation of humanity in evolutionary terms over tens of thousands of years it is possible to read Genesis’ theology on its own terms. A very interesting book I have been reading is ‘The Seven Pillars of Creation: Bible, Science and the Ecology of Wonder’ by William P. Brown (Oxford: 2010). In his approach to Genesis he makes some interesting points in attempting to reconcile the theology of scripture with the evolutionary history of humanity, which you may find interesting also as it touches on what you are trying to do. Brown argues:

quote:

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One should not even identify the imago as an individual matter at all. Human beings were created, according to Genesis 1, as a plurality, and out of this plurality arose culture…the imago is much bigger than the human brain and mind; it encompasses humanity collectively, culturally, and, according to Genesis, theologically.

---

Furthermore, if we accept that an example of humanity acting in the image of God is that of being religiously aware (among other things) then we have to be aware that the earliest “man made holy place” discovered so far, the ‘megatemple’ in Gobekli Tepe in Turkey has been dated to around 9,000 years old – much older than your dating of humanity’s beginnings in 4000BC. This shows evidence that ‘humans’ in the image of God, existed as a distinct religiously aware culture much earlier than the Bible’s chronology.

Brown goes on to argue regarding Genesis 2:

quote:

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In light of human evolution, the primal couple in the garden represents the hominid developing through various challenging transitions: from specialized knowledge to cognitive fluidity, from gathering food to cultivating the land, from nakedness to clothing, from blind trust to moral consciousness. From child to adult. This short story is a wonder of conflation.

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William Brown agrees with you that the functional side of the imago dei is expressed inhumanity’s propensity for rule – power over creation. But this is due to the evolutionary development of homo sapiens as a collective species, not the translation of a distinct individual to our world from a parallel one. If your thesis is correct then in 4000BC Adam would have arrived on earth to find himself among a species of ‘adam’ – already in the image of God, acting as humans, attempting to worship God, a species who had been doing so for many thousands of years.

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I think the biggest problem for assuming that the Genesis' ages are symbolic (by parallel) is that no one has produced a viable explanation for what all the numbers symbolise. You get guesses here and there, but it's widely acknowledged that no one has come even close.
What do the numbers mean then? The answer that makes most sense is they mean exactly what they say - this is how long the person lived...This is quite different from the symbolism of the numbers 7, 12, 40 and so on, which is well established, and which I accept. (See my interaction with Ken).

---

So you accept they are symbolic when the symbolism is understood, but not when the symbolism has been lost - then you say they must be literal. I don't accept that literalism is a necessary default position for exegesis when our understanding is incomplete or lost. I am happy just to accept the fact that we have lost the cultural knowledge that would have illuminated the symbolism for us. It is a shame of course, in a literary way, but not important for the conveying of the theological truths of scripture – which are its primary concern.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Mythos is as mythos does guys. I don't use terms I don't know the meaningS of. Why would I?

Gamaliel, you appear to contradict yourself. Where am I going wrong ? Telling Mike that Genesis can't be myth and [historical] fact yet believing, as do I, in "a mix of legend and historically grounded events".

We're all oscillating around that. I see NO theological necessity for Adam to be real or for the Flood to have happened as my alienation is mine. I couldn't care less how it happened, only that it is resolved in Christ Jesus, God becoming human.

However I do bow the knee to Eden, Adam and Eve and The Serpent being real. Just as Satan is now. It would be nothing for the Holy Spirit to preserve that truth through thousands of years of lost records.

Not that it matters. It does matter that any Christian says that it DOES one way or the other. The wooden and atheist materialist extremes that meet each other in being closed.
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 
I think that what Martin just said is probably the best post on this thread so far. Seriously.
 

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Posted by shamwari (# 15556) on :
 
In response to Gamaliel may I clarify my position somewhat. I said earlier that Gen 1-11 is myth and 12-50 is legend.

That needs breaking down a bit.

I think Gen 1-3 is myth. By which I mean stories told to affirm a number of truths without regard to their historicity. Adam (which is a plural word) is a generic term. He is representative man and I read his story as mine.

The Flood and Tower of Babel stories are a mix in that there is some historical memory which has been deployed to make a number of theological points. ( von Rad identifies the escalating nature of sin and its consequences as being amongst these.) He also ( convincingly IMO) says that the Jahwist writer uses all these stories - the Fall; Cain and Abel; Flood and Tower of Babel -- to illustrate God as a God of Judgement and Mercy.

When it comes to the Patriarchs the legendry component is that these represent the high moments of Tribal Leaders which have been passed on orally for years before being written down. Their historicity is irrecoverable given that the motive for retelling was to affirm faith and not to record history. von Rad uses them to indicate that the theme of Promise and Fulfilment.

This breakdown may come close to what Gamaliel identifies as his position.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
Thank you ken. I was thinking much the same thing, but was afraid it would be unfashionable to say so. Shame on me, and thank you Martin.
 

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Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
I see NO theological necessity for Adam to be real or for the Flood to have happened as my alienation is mine.

---

Amen.

quote:

---

However I do bow the knee to Eden, Adam and Eve and The Serpent being real. Just as Satan is now. It would be nothing for the Holy Spirit to preserve that truth through thousands of years of lost records.

---

You see 'NO theological necessity', but you 'bow the knee' anyway? I'm confused. And the 'it COULD have happened so it MUST have happened' argument is just as invalid when applied to the Holy Spirit as to any urban legend. If I believed all the things that the Holy Spirit MUST have done, I'd be a Roman Catholic.

Or perhaps it's just me. I don't see that we should give concessions to wrong-headed literalism.

- Chris.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
Well if I can give my take (and what resonated in Martin's post with me), my personal theology doesn't require a literal Adam, universal flood, and so on, but my intuition tends to believe in these things whether my intellect likes it or not. That said, like Martin, I wouldn't make those going-to-the-stake issues, and like Martin, I think what Christ is and does is the central issue.

(Taking the long view, I'm also sceptical of the esteem in which theories in fields such as anthropology are held, so I think trying to combat them in detail is a waste of time).
 

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Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eutychus:
(Taking the long view, I'm also sceptical of the esteem in which theories in fields such as anthropology are held, so I think trying to combat them in detail is a waste of time).

---

Fair enough to that. I'm reminded of the esteem philology was held in in the 19th century. I suppose I'm not a fan of making confident pronouncement as to the state of humanity at that point in history, beyond than the scant evidence allows - whether that confidence comes from the bible or from the latest academic fad.

- Chris.
 

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Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Ok ... to clarify.

I s'pose what I was clumsily trying to say was that I thought I knew what Martin meant but there was something in shamwari's post that made me wonder whether I'd got the wrong end of the stick ... or whether Martin was talking in riddles again.

I understand the point he eloquently makes above ... but, unlike Eutychus and, perhaps, Ken, I'm no longer inclined in my gut, as it were, to take Eden, Adam and Eve and so on in a literal sense - although I will take them figuratively and representatively ie - they represent all mankind, they represent me.

I don't particularly feel as though I've crossed a Rubicon here. I'm not sure how fundie I was when I used to be in a fairly fundie church.

It's funny though, I spent much of today with a very conservative group of Christians and felt entirely at home ... even though I'm probably further to the left than most, if not all, of them.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
I have to say of Martin's 'profound post', that it just looks like a series of contradictory statements.

I want to say a little bit more about the purported 'symbolism' of the ages in Genesis 5 and 11. Thanks for your excellent post, reflecting on many points, Hawk.
You claim that just because we can't work out the symbolism, doesn't mean it's not there.

That may be so in certain places in the bible. However, In the case of these numbers, I disagree. Typically, we are able to work out the number symbolism in the Old Testament. 7, 12, 40, three days, third day - these symbolisms can be worked out because they are used a number of times in the Hebrew Bible, and more frequently than other non-symbolic numbers (6, 11, second day etc.)

But these numbers in Genesis 5, 11 have no consistent repetition, and their variation makes the idea that there could be symbolism impossible.

130, 800
105, 807
90, 815
70, 840
65, 830
162, 800
65, 300
187, 782
182, 595
500

100, 500
35, 403
30, 403
34, 430
30, 209
32, 207
30, 200
29, 119
70

There is no symbolism there, such that a symbolic meaning could be ascribed to each number. In which case the question remains: on what basis were the numbers chosen?

Obviously, there are patterns. Especially obvious is that things are different after the Flood. Age at birth of son is lower after the Flood. But scholars have been trying for a long time now to find a symbolism in the individual numbers, and the reason they have failed is because there is no symbolism there.

The main reason they are trying is to avoid the clear meaning of the text - the text really is claiming exactly what the plain reading tells you - that these men were that old when they had their son, and they lived that long afterwards.

I am unconvinced that any concept of myth, even if it applies elsewhere in Genesis, can get around the plain meaning here.
 

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Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 
Nevertheless, there is simply no evidence that human lifespans were ever that long.

You're gonna need a really big styptic pencil for all those Occam's Razor cuts...
 

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Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
7, 12, 40, three days, third day - these symbolisms can be worked out because they are used a number of times in the Hebrew Bible, and more frequently than other non-symbolic numbers (6, 11, second day etc.)

---

Why do you assume other numbers like 6, 11, and 2 are not symbolic?

quote:

---

But these numbers in Genesis 5, 11 have no consistent repetition, and their variation makes the idea that there could be symbolism impossible.

---

Do you really mean that the very idea is impossible? Swedenborgians would tend to disagree.

quote:

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There is no symbolism there, such that a symbolic meaning could be ascribed to each number.

---

In the original text, these numbers are not single numbers. For example, Seth lived "five years and one hundred years" rather than simply 105 years. So there's no need to assign every number its own unique symbolism, since it would be sufficient to have a symbolic meaning for the numbers one through ten and make an assumption that a number like 800 would have a symbolic meaning similar to 8 (e.g. for emphasis).
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Thanks, Hawk, for the Gobekli Tepe reference. I was unaware of it as the oldest 'Holy site'.
My approach to such sites is to deny that the beings that produced them were human. Way upthread, you'll recall the discussion on the subject - animals will be judged, and the most advanced animals the more so, so we expect them to have a consciousness of God.

But if they were human as we are, why couldn't they write? They could certainly carve, and they had the time to learn to write....so why didn't they develop writing? Why don't we have evidence of the counting and administration that came with the Mesopotamian civilization?

I think it's because administration requires traits that are solely the domain of humans - for example, making contracts, with the inherent promises about the future.
These beings left no trace of that kind of stuff, because they couldn't marry, make promises or make rules..... they weren't human.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
But these numbers in Genesis 5, 11 have no consistent repetition, and their variation makes the idea that there could be symbolism impossible.

130, 800
105, 807
90, 815
70, 840
65, 830
162, 800
65, 300
187, 782
182, 595
500

100, 500
35, 403
30, 403
34, 430
30, 209
32, 207
30, 200
29, 119
70

There is no symbolism there, such that a symbolic meaning could be ascribed to each number. In which case the question remains: on what basis were the numbers chosen?

---

No symbolism apparent to you is not the same as no symbolism. One could hypothesize, for example, that the numbers are the result of some gematria-like system, where the symbolism is in the derivation of the sums rather than numbers themselves.

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Obviously, there are patterns. Especially obvious is that things are different after the Flood. Age at birth of son is lower after the Flood. But scholars have been trying for a long time now to find a symbolism in the individual numbers, and the reason they have failed is because there is no symbolism there.

The main reason they are trying is to avoid the clear meaning of the text - the text really is claiming exactly what the plain reading tells you - that these men were that old when they had their son, and they lived that long afterwards.

I am unconvinced that any concept of myth, even if it applies elsewhere in Genesis, can get around the plain meaning here.

---

Once again, your standard for literalism seems a bit arbitrary. If the "plain meaning" is the preferred one for this verse rather than symbolism or simple mythic exaggeration, why not elsewhere? Why not go with the "plain meaning" that everything in the Universe was created in more or less its present state a few millennia ago? Or that there are literal "floodgates" in the heavens (or "windows" if you prefer the King James version) which hold back the "waters above"? It just seems like arguing from preference rather than consistency.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
But if they were human as we are, why couldn't they write? They could certainly carve, and they had the time to learn to write....so why didn't they develop writing? Why don't we have evidence of the counting and administration that came with the Mesopotamian civilization?

I think it's because administration requires traits that are solely the domain of humans - for example, making contracts, with the inherent promises about the future.
These beings left no trace of that kind of stuff, because they couldn't marry, make promises or make rules..... they weren't human.

---

Quite frankly, if the ability to build something like Göbekli Tepe (or Çatal Hüyük, or a fortified town like Jericho) isn't sufficient evidence of advanced administration and the ability to make plans (i.e. think about the future), I don't know what you'd consider sufficient.

By your argument, one could argue that the Cherokee (and most surrounding tribes) weren't human until sometime around the early nineteenth century. After all, if they were people they'd be able to write.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
My approach to such sites is to deny that the beings that produced them were human.

---

Well, I couldn't have put my objection to your case more clearly than that.

Your original claim (in response to my objection) was that animals also grieved for their dead. Then you argued that they also buried their dead. Now you're arguing that erecting a place of worship is also 'animal' behaviour. What it comes down to is you believe that anything which happened up to New Year's Eve, 3999 BC (as it were) cannot be human, despite any indications to the contrary.

I'm finding it hard to understand how you can see this to be less of an assumption than assumuing the genealogies in Scripture are not to be taken on what you call a "flat reading".

quote:

---

But if they were human as we are, why couldn't they write?

---

Wow. Just... wow. This takes me back to my nervousness about your parallel race theory actually being about a master race. Are you saying that prior to the arrival of Europeans, Australian Aboriginals weren't human? Are you telling me that an ethnic group I work lots with here in Europe and which is largely illiterate isn't human? And are you trying to argue that bureaucracy is a sign of being human?

[x-post with Croesos]

[ 10. February 2011, 05:05: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
Akk, I'm not awake properly. Read: "anything which happened prior to New Year's Eve, 4001 BC"...
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Wow indeed - did I really write that? I want to retract, please.

What was going through my mind, and expressed so terribly was something like this:

Consider the fact that it was only with the Mesopotamian civilization that writing began. Doesn't it strike you as odd that writing only came forth after 4000 B.C., and not before. Doesn't it point to a striking change somewhere about that point, like perhaps the fact that Homo sapiens became human about 4000 B.C.?

I'd like to underline that I did not intend to convey that individuals or groups who can not write are somehow less human. That would be an atrocious sentiment or argument.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
You wrote:

quote:

---

But if they were human as we are, why couldn't they write?

---

The implication is that a people that can't write aren't human. Do you retract that?

I think not. The rest of your post simply restates the same argument. Writing emerged c.4000 BC, your calculations put Adam there, ergo it's a sign of being human. Which leaves all the uncomfortable implications I've pointed out.

That said, it's not very relevant. Judging by the way you've argued on this thread, if someone comes along and posts hard evidence of writing from 4001 BC or earlier, you'll simply argue that chimpanzees or rabbits or some such have been 'proved' to 'write', so it's not a sign of being human after all, and so on.

If someone could demonstrate the existence of income tax before 4000 BC, I'm sure you'd move the goalposts again and argue something similar, and here's why:

Your starting point is that there were no 'human' humans before Adam and that Adam was c.4000 BC. There you stand and (apparently) can do no other. So you will continue to shift your definition of 'human' to exclude anything of which there turns out to be compelling older evidence. What you don't seem to appreciate is that this takes you places (in terms of ideology, ethics and theology) that I'd hope you wouldn't want to go.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Mike

Show me.

Any contradiction.

Work at it mate.

One line of rhetoric based on your disposition doesn't cut it.

And once you believe the myths as HAVING to be true with regard to every 'fact' that doesn't fall through your semantic sieve (or should the analogy be the opposite: whatever falls through the holes is a fact?) ... Yeah, the latter, because what falls through sits on top of an obscures and arrogates science.

How big is your mesh ?

I'm 'guilty' of that from the start: most liberally educated Christians HAVE to be materialists, cannot approach a God approaching anywhere near literal.

In so doing they end up HAVING to believe that existence, life and mind are atheistic.

Despite the self-refutation of materialism: even if I allow nothing to fall to the floor, nothing of Genesis 1+ to be a 'fact', the floor is flawed.

Materialism is a dispositional, irrational faith from the start in the face of Fermi's paradox.

The floor doesn't go through my sieve.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
I never intended to say that a people who can't write aren't human. I retract anything that says or implies that. I like the income tax gag, Eutychus.

Let me concede that I feel close to the precipice here. The comment on administration and Jericho, etc. is well made.

I freely admit that my method is to argue that any Homo sapiens' activity before c. 4000 B.C. is non-human. (I think it's actually around 3930, but it's quite rough, so 4000 will do). That is because I am attempting a certain reconciliation of Scripture with mainstream science and history. Where will I stop? Before income tax, certainly - there are laws involved there! I'll throw in my whole theory if we can find activity before 4000 B.C. which is clearly human. What do I mean by clearly human activity? Activity which can be shown from the Bible to be the sole domain of humans. So I've got promises, laws and marriage as activities that are solely the domain of humans. Feel free to add to those, if you can.

Despite my thesis looking tenuous at this point, with your collective indulgence, I will attempt to push on, and we'll see if the whole thing becomes untenable here:

Animals are capable of high levels of planning. Birds plan to build, knowing their baby chick is coming. Bird nests are remarkable building efforts. Termites build amazing, 6-7 metre tall 'buildings' - huge, given their size.

Here's a link, showing orangutans plan http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090309121931.htm

So if these animals can do this, imagine what the most advanced animals ever created could do - especially given they were well adept with tools. Why couldn't they build Gobekli Tepe?

Turning to administration, and my comments above: The style of administration I had in mind (that which is solely the realm of humans) is that which relies on the making of laws. Clearly termites and birds can build amazing structures without that kind of administration. Why is it so obvious that the construction of Gobekli Tepe required the making of laws, when the building of birds' nests and termite mounds does not?
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
An ... another thing: once materialism is predicated on what it is, God [thinking] (or [God] Thinking), then the miraculous is resurrected. Allowed.

Eden for a start. From which COULD easily follow the genealogy.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Martin,

I'll admit that I don't respond well to those who have an opaque style. If you know much of Gunton or Barth or T.F. Torrance, for example I tend to avoid them if I can. A simple reason is that they seem to have had no interest in praying with the apostle Paul 'that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should'.

The contradiction I had in mind in your post was especially your seeing 'no theological necessity for Adam to be real'
while
'bowing the knee' to Adam being real.

How does one bow the knee to a concept?
Surely whatever it means, it must mean that it is important.
Yet how can it be important to you if you see no theological necessity for it?

In that way, your comment seems contradictory.

Other than the fact that you have kindly spent time responding to my ideas, and pressed me for an answer, I would have left it at my earlier curt remarks. The reason is that the other guys are quite clear, while you are not, and I can't answer everyone at length. I place a premium on clarity, and value those who spend time trying to be clear.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I'll throw in my whole theory if we can find activity before 4000 B.C. which is clearly human. What do I mean by clearly human activity? Activity which can be shown from the Bible to be the sole domain of humans. So I've got promises, laws and marriage as activities that are solely the domain of humans.

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I think that by your own lights, you're going to be on pretty safe ground, since I'm not sure how anything you're likely to qualify as promises, laws and marriage can be proven four thousand years after the event without a written record. One advantage for your argument of restricting your definition of "human" to things which depend on the ability to write (since that seems to have come after 4000 BC, not that I'm sure of that...).

Whether Adam (and Eve) had promises, extensive laws or indeed marriage in the way you envisage these things is another question again. Unless you think that "this is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh" constitutes an acceptable marriage vow. (Oh, and I'm not sure we see anyone in the Bible writing anything down prior to Abraham, do we...?)
 

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Posted by Hawk (# 14289) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Thanks, Hawk, for the Gobekli Tepe reference. I was unaware of it as the oldest 'Holy site'.
My approach to such sites is to deny that the beings that produced them were human....But if they were human as we are, why couldn't they write? They could certainly carve, and they had the time to learn to write....so why didn't they develop writing? Why don't we have evidence of the counting and administration that came with the Mesopotamian civilization?

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Well, others have pointed out the serious flaws in this argument. Written language didn't develop in 4000BC - not universally. One or two tribes and cultures developed it, later lost it, other groups developed it independently at a different time (Chinese), others later learnt it from others. It gradually spread in fits and starts. Some large cultures couldn't write until very recently. Other tribes and cultures still haven't developed a written language. The act of writing is a ridiculous line to draw between human and non-human. Especially since apes have been taught to write as well.

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Why is it so obvious that the construction of Gobekli Tepe required the making of laws, when the building of birds' nests and termite mounds does not?

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This is true - in terms of levels of administration, planning capability etc, the difference is of degree only, not type. But this is what you are arguing. It is your point that proposes that the difference between humans and animals is that of administration. Animals show the ability to make promises; they have elaborate courtship rituals before beginning a monogomous relationships and a family, ape and monkey communities have laws. In one Japanese chimp community there is the law that only a certain class of elite chimps can use the hot pool to bath in while the lower class chimps have to stay sitting on the cold banks. If the lower class chimps try to use the pool they are attacked. This is a law that is made to regulate the community, though it is not written down as it is not needed to be. Your definitions of humanity do not fit the evidence, because you have arbitrarily chosen them first and then struggled to fit the evidence around them, denying and refusing to accept anything that doesn't fit your preconceived theory.

The difference between Gobekli Tepe and a termite mound is not only one of degree of planning required, the major shift is perhaps the ability to think in terms of symbols, and an awareness of and attempt to engage with a religious concept. The columns at Gobekli Tepe were carved with symbols of animals. These weren't just paintings of day-to-day events, (in itself a human trait as well) these were meaningful. It is this that leads to religous awareness. And it is this love of symbology that seems to be the greatest evidence of humanity.
 

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Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
I'm going to plug the British Museum's History of the World in 100 Objects here. Anyway, here's perhaps the oldest art object in their collection:
Reindeer swimming, about 13000 years old.
For what it's worth, they had Rowan Williams come on and say that this reveals a 'very religious impulse'.
 

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Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :
 
(Is anyone beside me thinking of Snow Crash and the Bicameral Mind theory which helped inspire it?)

I think a big problem with any attempt like this is trying to draw hard lines where none exist in nature. I know some people who would go so far as to deny evolution (but only for humans!) on the grounds that they found the idea that 'non-human parents gave birth to the first human' so unpalatable: humans have souls and non-humans don't.

Eutychus, you might say that the distance in time puts Mike Russell on safe ground, but really I think it just adds soft focus to an idea that's not really tenable. If you could look back with perfect clarity, I still don't think you could draw the hard-and-fast line that he's looking for. In the same way that a fertilised egg is and is not a human being, humans grew from something that was and was not human by a process of emergence.

Mike will no doubt demur from the naturalism inherent in my assertion above, but to my mind naturalism is just a statement about the way the world is observed to work today. To start claiming exceptionalism, miracles and what-not sounds like special pleading to me. We have no license from what we now observe to posit this (as Hawk points out, the chronology doesn't fit with our current archaeological findings), and no need if we adopt a different way of understanding Genesis 1-3.

This seems to be an attempt to re-make nature and history to fit in with a theory, when it should work the other way around. The length of time involved is the only thing that keeps it from falling apart.

- Chris.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by sanityman:
Eutychus, you might say that the distance in time puts Mike Russell on safe ground, but really I think it just adds soft focus to an idea that's not really tenable.

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Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. I meant that if his definition of 'being human' rests on things of which there is evidence only after 4000 BC, there will be no way of overturning his definition. If you were to define 'being human' as owning a PC, you could confidently assert that there were no humans prior to the 1970s.

AFAICS, he has for the moment chosen writing because its appearence coincides (so he thinks) with the date he has in mind. If PCs had emerged c.4000 BC, he could equally have chosen PCs. If compelling evidence of writing before 4000 BC emerges, either he will bin his theory altogether (as he claims he will above) or he will shift the definition of 'who's human' to something else again.
 

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Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

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Originally posted by sanityman:
Eutychus, you might say that the distance in time puts Mike Russell on safe ground, but really I think it just adds soft focus to an idea that's not really tenable.

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Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. I meant that if his definition of 'being human' rests on things of which there is evidence only after 4000 BC, there will be no way of overturning his definition. If you were to define 'being human' as owning a PC, you could confidently assert that there were no humans prior to the 1970s.

AFAICS, he has for the moment chosen writing because its appearence coincides (so he thinks) with the date he has in mind. If PCs had emerged c.4000 BC, he could equally have chosen PCs. If compelling evidence of writing before 4000 BC emerges, either he will bin his theory altogether (as he claims he will above) or he will shift the definition of 'who's human' to something else again.

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And apologies if I wasn't reading for comprehension. I do wonder though, given your point that the advent of (reading, income tax, or whatever) is just a convenient marker for the assumed "becoming human" of homo sapiens, whether it's even necessary? The theory might as well just state it baldly, as it had to have happened then to fit in with the author's Genesis chronology. Any credibility it loses by leaving out this marker was never actually there in the first place. (Which is probably exactly your point, so this is a long-winded way of agreeing with you).

Stated in slightly less literalistic/ontological terms, this reminds me a lot of the argument that the fall represented a loss of innocence or "coming of age" of humanity, when the dawning of moral sensibility and indeed awareness of self begat the ability to do evil qua evil, and an awareness of mortality inseparable from the ability to introspect. If this is what Mike defines as "being human" then I would agree - but I think you have to place this dawn of consciousness much further in the past that 4000BC, which then ends up arguing against the literal chronology of the first half of Genesis.

On the meta-question of why exactly it's so important to defend this point, I see a parallel between the gradual awakening of humanity and the gradual move from myth to history in Genesis. I don't think there's hard lines to be drawn in either, but in both cases, you know where you start and where you end up.

- Chris.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Hawk:

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Why is it so obvious that the construction of Gobekli Tepe required the making of laws, when the building of birds' nests and termite mounds does not?

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This is true - in terms of levels of administration, planning capability etc, the difference is of degree only, not type.

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I disagree. Termite mounds, birds nests, honeycombs, etc. are instinctive behavior. Birds hand-raised by humans in captivity will still build the same type of nest as the other members of their species. Ditto for the insect examples. Humans don't have a lot of pre-programmed instinctive behaviors like that. In short, the difference between consciously planning out the construction of something like Göbekli Tepe and the pheromonal signalling involved in building a termite mound is indeed one of type and not degree.

In short, neolithic settlements like Çatal Hüyük or Jericho indicate a degree of administration because humans need that degree of conscious planning to live together in groups of that size. We don't function based on pheromonal signals from the hive queen.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Good for you Mike.

My sins are mine. My brokenness, alienation, loss, emptiness, depravity, suffering all mine. My need for Jesus is mine, for me. I don't need Him to fix Adam (although I do in a sense: I need Him to fix everyone who can be fixed, but as He fixes me, He will), I need Him to fix me. He has, He is, He will. Fixed me, fixing me, fix me. And everyone else. All but universalistically - He won't fix anyone who does not want to be fixed.

I don't need a story as to how and why I'm bust. I'm bust.

So I don't need Adam.

But unlike atheist Christians, I don't NOT need him. I don't HAVE to deny him. The story of human evil - and we are evil, not just lacking in some final evolutionary development - makes sense with a fall.

If there were no literal Adam and Eve, no Eden, no Serpent then there no narrative has been adduced that accepts and explains our evil. Only one that rationalizes it away. Turns blood in to water.

Atheist Christians can't believe in absolute evil and have a liberal view of human nature, that it's basically good and on the way to better.

They can't believe in evil personified in Satan.

I do.

I'm orthodox. And parsimonious.

As I am scientifically: the philosophy of science is materialism. That stuff explains stuff.

It doesn't in three regards and the pivotal one is in the middle of the story of the universe. Life. Either side of that is the universe itself and mind.

This is the only planet in the universe with life: Fermi's paradox. Look it up Mike. It's the greatest miracle in creation.

To the atheists here this all makes me a worse whack job than you.

That's how evil they are they can't even see it.

How's that?
 

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Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard:
But unlike atheist Christians, I don't NOT need him. I don't HAVE to deny him. The story of human evil - and we are evil, not just lacking in some final evolutionary development - makes sense with a fall.

If there were no literal Adam and Eve, no Eden, no Serpent then there no narrative has been adduced that accepts and explains our evil. Only one that rationalizes it away. Turns blood in to water.

Atheist Christians can't believe in absolute evil and have a liberal view of human nature, that it's basically good and on the way to better.

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Martin, I hope you won't take it as an insult to say that your post made a lot of sense to me .

If I make take issue with one point (aside from "atheist Christians", which I'm still not sure I understand), it's your implied point that an evolutionary understanding is at all optimistic about human nature.

I'd say, on the contrary, that it's absolutely damning. Chimpanzees kill and eat the young of other chimpanzee tribes. I've seen the footage, and I was shocked and horrified. But they get away with it because they haven't eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. We have. We have no excuse, and with all our realised potential we do things that are far worse.

An unredeemed bestial nature is a terrible thing, and with our moral awakening we are guilty, as soon as we started asking the question. I honestly don't see the sort of utopian optimism that you state as a consequence of any sort of evolutionary understanding. On the contrary, the situation is hopeless: evolution is not evolution towards a moral ideal.

- Chris.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Chris. Wow! I must be slipping. Despite an errant 'there' in there.

Christian atheists: not those who are disciples of Christ in their own eyes and absolutely deny the existence of any supernatural being (and the tinier subset who, as in Christopher Ecclestone's superb portrayal in The Second Coming, believe in the death of God), but those who deny a God who is anything like the first level interpreted being in the Bible.

God the Killer.

I couldn't agree more on evolution having no transcendent outcome, but many science and speculative fiction writers up to and including Doris Lessing via Stephen Baxter, Ian M. Banks (and not!) and even Ian F. Hamilton and scientists like Carl Sagan and Frank Tippler and philosophers at least as far back as Spinoza believe that it does. All liberals believe in human goodness willing out. Project their idealized selves. Great writers like William Boyd, Somerset Maugham, Margaret Attwood ... name one who doesn't.

It takes really great writers like Golding NOT to.

I'm sure Dawkins doesn't believe it for a moment.

Christian atheists / materialists all seem to. I suppose it's possible to be one and to believe that evolution cannot progess beyond the deterministic cul-de-sac of evil, that we still need divine intervention to be redeemed, for God to deify us by becoming human.

I'll convince myself of that soon enough I'm sure! In a decade or two.

Martin
 

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Posted by Jahlove (# 10290) on :
 
just dropping in to say that, although i have nothing to add to this debate, I am following it with some considerable interest. Cheers, guys.

[ 10. February 2011, 23:29: Message edited by: Jahlove ]
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi all, I love Mondays. Recover from the hard work that was Sunday. I preached on Apologetics, and used a fair bit of Habermas' stuff on the resurrection.

Anyway, I feel a little misrepresented on certain aspects of my theory in this thread. So let me say a few words of clarification:

My theory does simply declare, on the basis of Genesis 5, 11 that any being pre- c. 4000 B.C., could not have been human.

I have also tried to make observations that support such a declaration. These have included pointing out certain human traits that did not occur anywhere in the world before that date. These include writing, and civilization (my definition here sides with Yoffee and Trigger - a more 'political' definition, which cites the first civilizations as the Egyptian and Sumerian and Indus Valley, c. 3300 BC).
But these observations do not constitute the argument itself for my date of 4000 BC - that is taken purely from the Bible.

On the subject of marriage, I do not accept the statement upthread that any other animals marry. Monogamy is not the same as marriage. Marriage is fundamentally a promise, and animals do not make such promises.

Let me cite some of my thesis on this, to show how I derive this from the Bible:

Crucially, according to the bible, it is highly unlikely that non-humans can make promises to one another. This can be deduced from a consideration of marriage. It is clear that the first recorded biblical marriage was between Adam and Eve. In Genesis 2:22-24, it is written that the female 'shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.' Thus the basis for the one flesh relationship of marriage is that the first woman was taken physically from the first man. It is the manner of Eve's creation, out of Adam's rib, which is the foundational reason why any man is able to be united to his wife. Therefore, marriage did not exist before the time when Eve was created. It was not until God used (fallen) Adam and Eve as models for the humanity of the 70 million pre-humans, that marriage came into our world.

But yet central to the notion of marriage is the notion of a marriage promise or covenant. In Malachi 2:14, we have confirmed for us that marriage is indeed a form of promise, a 'marriage covenant'. The verse reads as follows: 'You ask, "Why?" It is because the LORD is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant.' The conclusion to draw from this passage is that a covenant (a mutual promise to cleave to one another for life) is central to a marriage. It is implied that a marriage covenant is what a man has made when he has a wife, and that this covenant is such that the man would break faith with her if he violated the terms of the covenant promise.For this reason, it should be considered very unlikely that pre-humans engaged in covenants or promises of any sort. The logic goes as follows: If pre-humans made each other promises, there is no apparent reason why a male and female pre-human couldn't make promises to cleave only to the other sexually, for life. And this in turn would seem so close to a marriage, that one would be forced to admit that marriage is a good name for it. One could in theory argue that such a pre-human male and female covenant would not be 'blessed by God' in the same way as a human male and female marriage. Yet this is a very fine line. A much more satisfactory approach is to conclude that pre-humans did not make promises or covenants at all, and this is the approach here taken.

This argument can be pressed further, and applied to the existence and enforcement of law. The existence of a law implies that people can make promises to obey the law, and that other people can make promises to enforce the law. But we have just seen that the making of promises is almost certainly ruled out by the bible for non-humans. For this reason, not only are promise-making-and-keeping ruled out for pre-humans but also law-making-and-enforcing. This writer is unaware of any evidence of marriage or law-making or contracts in the ‘pre-human era’ (pre c. 4000 B.C.). None is likely to be found, since writing was not invented until around 3200 BC. [97]
Thus it can be accepted that pre-humans had certain forms of language, while not having the full range of human capabilities. It is plausible that promise making, law making, contract making and marriage are examples of human activity which pre-humans did not have, while they did have limited language. Therefore questions surrounding language are not terminal to this thesis’ major claim. However, some further questions do present themselves as a result of this line of argument: How did these pre-humans trade with each other without making promises? Further, in what kind of language system is it impossible to express a promise?
Regarding trade, the ability to make and keep promises is not essential for trade to occur. A promise is not required to swap goods, or to swap the same kinds of goods on a regular basis. To see this, notice that we train dogs to bring continually a certain kind of item in exchange for food. This can be seen as a certain kind of trade.Regarding the expression of a promise, it is the concept of a promise which this writer does not believe pre-humans could grasp. While they may have had language to express various things, the expression of a promise requires understanding of important abstract concepts. A promise not only involves understanding the concept of the future, but also the commitment to act a certain way in that future. Thus we can postulate credibly that the understanding and execution of promises was a very important difference between the most advanced pre-humans and the first humans.

You can read more of this under 'Full Draft Thesis'
at http://originofhumanity.blogspot.com
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
But what about Jericho, Gobleki Tepe and so on?

Croesos raises a good challenge as to whether birds' nests and termite mounds are produced by behaviour of the same character as the building of walls and stairs and symbols and a purported 'temple' at Jericho.

I have given this some thought, and have read a fair bit of a couple of books - 'Built by Animals' (Hansell), and 'The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind'(Savage-Rumbaugh). I admit to these being the first serious books I've read in these topic areas.

Here's a short list of likely achievements of pre-4000 B.C. Homo sapiens:

1. carving symbolic representations
2. producing original structures which take complex planning
3. multiple Homo sapiens working together on sizeable projects
4. mourning the dead
5. trade
6. belief in post-death existence

On 1. symbology, Savage-Rumbaugh's work shows apes have an ability to use and interpret symbols to communicate. I don't think the symbolic carving at Jericho or Gobleki etc. is beyond an advanced animal.

I discuss 4. 5. and 6. upthread or in my thesis.

It is 2. and 3. which (when combined) I have not discussed, and which I am considering for the first time now.

I do admit that the production of stairs and walls takes an element of 'planning the end result in one's mind', in a fashion which would not be the case with termites building a high mound. The bird may indeed 'see the end result' in her mind, in a way the termites don't. But a nest is hardly an original structure in the same fashion as the the structures at Jericho.

Do we have evidence of animals building complex structures which take serious planning? There is the evidence of elephants acting as a group to bury their dead (see thesis for reference). This would count as animals working together to perform a challenging task, which required a joint vision of the end result. Note also that this joint-elephant work could be described as 'religious' in a certain fashion.

I think this may just be enough evidence to say that the work at Jericho etc. is of the same type as animal behaviour while being different in degree. Croesos will likely disagree, I expect. Responses will be welcome on this subject.

Lastly, there's the question of whether it's folly to try to draw a line in time like this at all. Can we firmly distinguish animal from human when looking back so deeply into the past?
Let me say that this is a question well outside the ambit of science. It's very much a theological question, and so one's theological worldview will guide one's answer.

In my view (and I get this from Romans 1), all people know in their hearts all sorts of theology and ethics, but we all suppress these truths to varying extents. I think an understanding that there is a sharp line between animals and humans is something we all know deep down, though some will suppress that truth.

On the specific claim that there is and ever was a sharp distinction different between human and animal, I will not defend the claim, but I direct any reader to his or her heart for the verdict. You already know I'm right on this question, whoever you are. You might just be suppressing it.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
It is clear that the first recorded biblical marriage was between Adam and Eve. In Genesis 2:22-24, it is written that the female 'shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.' (...) It was not until God used (fallen) Adam and Eve as models for the humanity of the 70 million pre-humans, that marriage came into our world.

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Where do you see Adam and Eve getting "married" as defined by you (with laws, covenants, and so on)? And do you see them "getting married" before the Fall, or only after it, for the purposes of example? Could marriage as you define it exist without writing?

quote:

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This writer is unaware of any evidence of marriage or law-making or contracts in the ‘pre-human era’ (pre c. 4000 B.C.). None is likely to be found, since writing was not invented until around 3200 BC.

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This is what I meant upthread when I said you were on safe ground by your own lights. You have defined being human by things of which you are pretty sure there is no evidence earlier than 4000 BC. This is putting the cart before the horse.

However, I repeat my earlier question, which is when do you see the first evidence of writing in the Bible? Are you sure Adam and Eve could write? I haven't looked, but offhand I'd say there's no evidence of writing prior to Genesis 11.

quote:

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Lastly, there's the question of whether it's folly to try to draw a line in time like this at all. Can we firmly distinguish animal from human when looking back so deeply into the past?
Let me say that this is a question well outside the ambit of science. It's very much a theological question, and so one's theological worldview will guide one's answer.

---

This is as much as to say, in response to the objections being raised here, "la la la, I can't hear you".

You then go on to argue that all of us know that there is a distinction between animal and human anyway and that anyone who differs is wrong. But you have shifted the goalposts once again. I haven't seen anybody on this thread argue there's no difference between animals and humans. What has been argued, pretty convincingly to my mind, is that there is not a shred of evidence whatsoever, either in Scripture or without, for

a) biologically identical lifeforms, some of whom are human and some of whom are not, existing concurrently

b) a divine upgrade from sub-human to (fallen) human for some of these lifeforms, alongside "pure" descendants of Adam and Eve, some time after the Fall

I also repeat my assertion that by flailing around in search of something to define human which can confidently be dated post-4000 BC, you are in grave danger of missing the sense of what it means to be human at all.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi again Eutychus,
Without fully responding to your post, I will say I am a little frustrated that you still haven't understood my point about writing.

I will feel better about your critiques when you get what I am saying about writing.

It is not essential to write to be human.
I don't think Adam and Eve could write.
That should be clear in that I date Adam about 4000 BC, and writing was invented around 3200 BC.

All I'm saying is that full-blown writing (which includes implicit laws of syntax, grammar etc.) only occurs well after 4000 B.C. My point is that if it were earlier than 4000 B.C., my case would be hopeless. But since 4000 BC is earlier than the rise of (political) civilization, my case becomes worth considering.

The date 4000 B.C. comes from Genesis 5, 11. It doesn't come from some random date where writing was invented.

I feel like I've said this quite a few times now.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
It is not essential to write to be human.
I don't think Adam and Eve could write.
That should be clear in that I date Adam about 4000 BC, and writing was invented around 3200 BC.

---

I hear you.

Where you don't seem to be hearing me is that to my mind, all the ways you choose to define being human involve a written record, thereby making it pretty certain nobody's going to be able to come along and find extra-biblical evidence of being human (by your lights) before writing emerged.

quote:

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The date 4000 B.C. comes from Genesis 5, 11. It doesn't come from some random date where writing was invented.

---

I see that, but I feel as if you've chosen your benchmark (writing) to ensure that no evidence of "being human" (by your lights) can be found prior to 4000 BC.

Aside from discussions about simultaneous sub-humans and humans (which is far more contentious and you which seem to keep evading), I contest your choice of criteria (which in effect is writing). It's hard (for me, anyway) to look at the carving referenced above by Dafyd here and not see something intrinsically human in origin, instantly recognisable as such - and apparently much older than 4000 BC.

Besides, I would still like to know more about Adam and Eve's marriage as you see it.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
So, Mike, according to you, were there, or could there have been, or did there HAVE to be sentient, self-aware, abstract reasoning, symbol using, morally accountable, evolved creatures prior to Eden ?
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Eutychus - I think we need to be precise about this - I can't derive any other criteria from the Bible than marriage, making laws and making promises. The fact that these can only be recorded in writing is not my fault.

You assert that the reindeer swimming carving is evidence of human activity. Can you prove it from the Bible? If not, you are venturing into natural theology to answer the question of what is human.... what you are really attacking then is my sola Scriptura approach to matters of theology.

@Martin
yes there could there have been sentient, self-aware, symbol using, morally accountable, evolved creatures prior to Eden. Yes, I'm saying there were in fact such creatures. Did they have abstract reasoning? I think I'd need that defined....if abstract reasoning includes making a plan and executing it (like the Elephants did when burying their dead), then yes, such creatures existed pre-Adam.

Did there have to be such beings? This really depends on what sort of necessity you mean in 'have to be'.
If you mean, is it essential to my theory? Yes, I think so. I can't see a way around it within my theory.
Could my theory be wrong? Of course.
How central is it to my Christianity? It's not a first order issue.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Eutychus.

On your complaint that my theory has 'sub-humans' and humans living concurrently, I would point out this important element of my theory:

I do not believe that the pre-human Homo sapiens ever met humans, or vice versa. Adam was in a different physical world from ours when he was in perfection, so he never met the pre-humans. By the time Cain was cast into our world (the first entry into our world by a descendant of Adam), all the Homo sapiens in our world were human - they received their (fallen) humanity derived from the fallen humanity of Adam.
 

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Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:

You assert that the reindeer swimming carving is evidence of human activity. Can you prove it from the Bible? If not, you are venturing into natural theology to answer the question of what is human.... what you are really attacking then is my sola Scriptura approach to matters of theology.

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Actually, ISTM he's attacking your sola scriptura approach to matters of biology. "What is human?" is not a theological question. And the Bible is evidence of nothing except the beliefs of the ancient Hebrews.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
On the subject of marriage, I do not accept the statement upthread that any other animals marry. Monogamy is not the same as marriage. Marriage is fundamentally a promise, and animals do not make such promises.

<snip>

The logic goes as follows: If pre-humans made each other promises, there is no apparent reason why a male and female pre-human couldn't make promises to cleave only to the other sexually, for life. And this in turn would seem so close to a marriage, that one would be forced to admit that marriage is a good name for it. One could in theory argue that such a pre-human male and female covenant would not be 'blessed by God' in the same way as a human male and female marriage.

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So "[m]onogamy is not the same as marriage" but "promises to cleave only to the other sexually, for life" (a.k.a. monogamy) is "so close to a marriage, that one would be forced to admit that marriage is a good name for it". Isn't that a rather blatant self-contradiction? More critically, doesn't your whole argument reduce to "it's convenient for me to believe this, so I will, regardless of evidence".

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Crucially, according to the bible, it is highly unlikely that non-humans can make promises to one another. This can be deduced from a consideration of marriage. It is clear that the first recorded biblical marriage was between Adam and Eve. In Genesis 2:22-24, it is written that the female 'shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.' Thus the basis for the one flesh relationship of marriage is that the first woman was taken physically from the first man. It is the manner of Eve's creation, out of Adam's rib, which is the foundational reason why any man is able to be united to his wife. Therefore, marriage did not exist before the time when Eve was created. It was not until God used (fallen) Adam and Eve as models for the humanity of the 70 million pre-humans, that marriage came into our world.

---

Why is that the basis for the first marriage, while man being taken out of woman (a.k.a. birth) is not? Seems a bit of a sexist double standard.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Croesos
I don't see the contradiction - if there's no promise, there's no marriage. If someone is just shacking up with their girlfriend, and has made no promise about their sexual commitment being for life, they are not married, even if they end up being monogamous for life. It was never a marriage.

Likewise, if an animal couple happen to be monogamous for life, it's not a marriage by virtue of the monogamy.

What I was saying was that if the animals could make promises, it's hard to see how they couldn't marry. But the Bible makes it clear that only humans marry. Hence animals can't make promises.

Of course this logic hinges on the Bible being true in the first place. I'm not defending that in this thread - plenty of other threads will have a crack at that, I'm sure.

In this thread, I am defending the fact that the Bible can be reconciled with mainstream science and history in the way I am outlining. Various points in the Bible with which you disagree don't undermine such a thesis.

@Timothy
I deny that the question what is human? is biological.
I grant that the question what are Homo sapiens is biological.
But the two are vastly different questions.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
MikeRussell

since you're back before I've had time to compose a proper answer, can you please exegete how you see Adam and Eve making promises with regard to marriage... from Genesis?
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Eutychus
well I can start with this - in Genesis 2:25, Eve is called Adam's wife.

While Adam and Eve's wedding vows are not recorded, it can be derived from Genesis 2 and elsewhere in the Bible that marriage implies a promise.

In terms of Genesis 2, 'for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife', Jesus adds the comment, 'therefore what God has joined together let no one put asunder.'

Jesus uses this text to basically say don't get divorced. But what is divorce, exactly? Divorce isn't just separation. Divorce is saying that 'I want to be in a position to marry someone else'. Why is it wrong to divorce? Because marriage isn't solely about the functions like sex, raising children, and living in the same place. Marriage is also an agreement, a mutual understanding, a promise to be and work and purpose together. Divorce is wrong because it's breaking that promise, violating that marriage covenant.

And Jesus sees all of that coming out of Genesis 2:24, and that phrase 'united to his wife'.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
On your complaint that my theory has 'sub-humans' and humans living concurrently, I would point out this important element of my theory: I do not believe that the pre-human Homo sapiens ever met humans, or vice versa. Adam was in a different physical world from ours when he was in perfection, so he never met the pre-humans.

---

I would like to point out again how utterly innovative this is.

Irrespective of whether Adam met pre-human humans, you claim they lived at the same time and ultimately intermingled (by Adam being "projected into our world"). Despite your protestations that this puts us all on the same footing, you cannot back right off a lurking "master race" thesis, witness your willingness to entertain assumptions such as

quote:

---

Ashkenazi intelligence may be explainable in terms of my thesis… the Ashkenazis [may] have a significant proportion of descent from Adam

---

In my view, the prospect of a conmingled human race deriving from two distinct worlds, raises theological, ideological and ethical issues which are far more serious than whether we have to take Genesis genealogies at face value … and this without a shred of biblical evidence. Do you not find it surprising that Scripture doesn't say anything about these dual origins of humanity?

quote:

---

I can't derive any other criteria from the Bible than marriage, making laws and making promises

---

I'll come back to the problems with this for Adam and Eve in a minute, but I'd like to point out what a poor definition of being human I consider this to be. Marriage, promises and laws are all fine and good, but it seems to me that to reduce being human to the existence of these things is to ignore some rather massive and more universal traits of humanity which are all over the Bible (as well as seemingly evident to many of us pre 4000 BC). Just for one thing, we're said to be made in the image of God. I don't think God marries, and many humans don't, so I find it curious that this should be so central to your definition.

quote:

---

in Genesis 2:25, Eve is called Adam's wife. While Adam and Eve's wedding vows are not recorded, it can be derived from Genesis 2 and elsewhere in the Bible that marriage implies a promise.

---

Firstly, who do you think wrote Genesis? I would be surprised if you thought it was written down any earlier than Moses. Eve is called Adam's "wife" (and I'm not in a position to check the Hebrew right now) as a comment by the author, not in the mouth of Adam.

Secondly, try as I might I can't read any vows or promises in Genesis 2. Sure, marriage is seen in those terms subsequently, but it just isn't there in Genesis. You can't derive a promise (by Adam or Eve) from Genesis 2. You're reading that back into the text from much later.

[ 15. February 2011, 13:44: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Ashkenazi intelligence ... WHAT ?

This is INSANE.
 

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Posted by sanityman (# 11598) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
In my view (and I get this from Romans 1), all people know in their hearts all sorts of theology and ethics, but we all suppress these truths to varying extents.

---

Mike, I'm answering you directly as as far as I can tell I was the only one who had made the point you are addressing.

If I understand you correctly, you are contending that Paul's assertion "since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made..." (Romans 1:20) means that no argument against teleology is valid. Also, as a logical consequence of this, it means that anyone who does not believe the teleological argument is, at some level, acting and arguing in bad faith.

Two comments:
1) Assuming your opponents are acting in bad faith if they disagree with you is poison to any sort of civilised debate. It's fine to disagree with your opponents, but if you do not admit that their stance can be honestly held then they can't talk to you. You're in Richard Dawkins' company here, and I hope you're happy with that.
2) You claim a lot more from the verse than can be reasonably held, IMV. It must be very convenient to have a proof-text which says that everyone else knows deep down that you are right, but that's not what the passage is saying, in context. "Suppress the truth" does not necessarily mean "suppressing it in their own hearts" - that's a very modernist, individualistic reading. To claim that "what may be known about God is plain to them" should be taken at face value is to claim we don't need the bible or, more importantly, Christ: everything that may be known about God is already plain! This is a reductio ad absurdum to a literalist reading. Also IMV, any attempt to read Romans 1 without acknowledging that it acts as a rhetorical device to lead in to Romans 2 is doomed to miss its point.

In summary: your reading of Romans 1 is suspect, and the conclusion you too-readily draw from it destroys any chance you might have of constructively engaging with people who do not share your views.

quote:

---

On the specific claim that there is and ever was a sharp distinction different between human and animal, I will not defend the claim, but I direct any reader to his or her heart for the verdict. You already know I'm right on this question, whoever you are. You might just be suppressing it.

---

Only one question: this implies that you disbelieve evolution - at least as it applies to humans. Is that true? Please note that at no point did I say there wasn't a distinction between humans and animals: I merely assert that humans evolved from something that was not a moral, self-aware animal into something that was, and that one doesn't need special pleading to get from A to B.

Also, What Eutychus and Martic PC just said. The philosophical position that there can be sub-human "humans" is very ethically troubling. Every genocide seems to have at it's root the de-humanisation of the "other" - and here you are, seeking to give that sort of thinking a "biblical" basis. My reality check has by this stage bounced so high that it's in orbit.

- Chris.
 

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Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 
It's a good thing this horse is already dead -- the poor thing's taking quite a few kicks.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Eutychus:

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:

I can't derive any other criteria from the Bible than marriage, making laws and making promises

---

I'll come back to the problems with this for Adam and Eve in a minute, but I'd like to point out what a poor definition of being human I consider this to be. Marriage, promises and laws are all fine and good, but it seems to me that to reduce being human to the existence of these things is to ignore some rather massive and more universal traits of humanity which are all over the Bible (as well as seemingly evident to many of us pre 4000 BC). Just for one thing, we're said to be made in the image of God. I don't think God marries, and many humans don't, so I find it curious that this should be so central to your definition.

---

I agree with Eutychus -- the biblical definition of humanity is 'the image of God'. And what do we see God doing (especially in Genesis, which is where we are told about the image of God)? God makes things. And, as creatures made to be like God, we make things -- we draw pictures, form sculptures, make up stories and music, plant gardens and so on and so on. We do these things not because we're programmed to do them, as bees are programmed to build hives, but because we want to -- we choose to make things, make them as beautiful as we can, and call them 'good', just like God does.

And, FWIW, the earliest known cave paintings are thought to be at least 10,000 years old. I should think that painting would be a better indicator of 'humanness' than would writing, since, as others have already shown upthread, writing is such a recent innovation in several clearly human cultures.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
There's lots I want to respond to here guys, but I've got time right now just for this:

I'm still feeling misunderstood on my definition vs. identification of humanity.

You'll see upthread that I do think 'image of God' is the Bible's contribution on the question 'what is human'. I'm happy to say that it's as close as the Bible comes to defining humanity. And I give my understanding of the term at great length upthread.

My definition of humanity is NOT 'ability to make promises, make laws, and marry'. Those are some of my approaches to identifying humans - those are some of the uniquely human traits I can identify from the Bible.

Please, please, please, work on understanding the difference between a definition and a means for identification.
 

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Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 
I clearly gave both a definition - image of God - which you seem to agree with, and a means of identification - creativity - which I'm guessing is where you have a problem agreeing.

Why do you need to base the identification solely on the Bible? If you're willing to entertain extra-biblical scientific and historial evidence, why not look beyond the Bible for the 'traits of humanity' as well?
 

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Posted by koshatnik (# 11938) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Lothiriel:
I agree with Eutychus -- the biblical definition of humanity is 'the image of God'. And what do we see God doing (especially in Genesis, which is where we are told about the image of God)? God makes things. And, as creatures made to be like God, we make things -- we draw pictures, form sculptures, make up stories and music, plant gardens and so on and so on. We do these things not because we're programmed to do them, as bees are programmed to build hives, but because we want to -- we choose to make things, make them as beautiful as we can, and call them 'good', just like God does.

---

I found this wonderful. Thanks.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@sanityman

Hi, yes, thanks for your reflections on Romans 1. It's a bit off topic, but I'm interested enough to respond.

I think Romans 1 is in the end about individuals, because the logic is heading toward each individual mouth being silenced before God, and each individual being unrighteous and thus needing Jesus. (Romans 3:19-20)

I think Romans 1 is saying among other things that every individual knows God's 'eternal power and divine nature', 'from what has been made'.

I don't believe this is saying that we all know the truth about the teleological argument for God's existence. I think what it means is that either looking into the world or looking into ourselves, we all can know, should know and do know about God.

It's not that God is the end of an argument (X and Y therefore God exists), but rather that God is directly apprehended by us all, and that God is plain to all.

Some suppress this truth (Romans 1:18), which is why there are people who claim to be atheists and agnostics.

But the truths we all know are not limited to God's existence. Romans 1:29-31 gives a list of vices, and says that we all know that those who do such things deserve death. This means not only that we know a whole bunch of ethical content (deep down), but that we all know that those who perform those vices deserve death.

My conclusion, theologically, is that the list of vices in verses 29-31 is not a complete list of vices, but that we all know sufficient ethics (deep down) to live a life fully pleasing to God. Adam and Eve, before the fall, could have lived an obedient life, pleasing to God, without a Bible telling them the 'rules'.

The reason we need the Bible's list of virtues and vices now is that because of our sin, we all suppress the ethical truths that we know, to various extents.

And this is important for the explanation of the gospel. Why? Because it's important to insist that all people are without excuse before God (Romans 1:20). We know God, we know ethics, we know we deserve death. We just suppress it. So when people are sentenced to eternal death at the Judgment Day, they will know they deserve it. They know it's coming and they know they deserve it already, how much more will they know it then. So the final Judgment, including the sentencing of some to hell, will be fair. They will be without excuse.

Therefore if I start arguing in such a way that it seems people might have an excuse, I detract from the gospel. Therefore in discussing ethical content, the existence of God, and our deserving death, I will not argue the point. My approach is simply to say that you know it already.

Sure, that will be offensive. It's not good for debate. But we can debate plenty of other things.

For example, the entirety of God's work in history is not known by all. So we can debate God's creation (as we are doing here, at great length), the historical character of Israel, the prophets, the historical promises of God and their fulfillment, and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

Yes, I expect atheists to be offended when I say they are suppressing the truth by their wickedness that God is there. But I'm not going to compromise the gospel by intimating they might have an excuse before God.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Lothiriel

Following on from the last post, I think Romans 1 does enough to show that it is especially in areas of ethics, God's existence and our deserving judgment that we suppress the truth. We so desperately want to pretend to ourselves that we don't have a problem before God, and that we can live however we want, that we suppress these areas of our knowledge. These areas are the areas of knowledge that relate most to our being without excuse before God, so there is great reason for us to suppress them in our wickedness.

Now where does the question of defining and identifying humans come in? Is that something we are likely to know already and suppress (like God's existence), or something we are likely to only know if revealed to us (like the Trinity, and like Jesus' resurrection) or something we can work out ourselves, and are unlikely to suppress (like the laws of logic or geometry).

I think it's a combination.

I can imagine plenty of reasons to suppress the truth that we are 'in God's image' - like that it implies we know God is there, which leads to us admitting our guilt before him.

On the other hand, there aren't many obvious reasons to suppress the truth about our biology and physical make up. And our physical description is clearly part of a full definition of human.

The important reason to go to the Bible for the definition of humanity is that a portion of the definition is such that we are likely to suppress it or warp it in our sinfulness.

It's even possible that some of the definition of human and means of identification of human is not known to us at all, so it's not that we're suppressing it, but rather that we can't know it apart from revelation. In this case, looking at the Bible is clearly essential. Even if this is not the case, due to our sin, the Bible is essential on this question.

Our sin has muddied the waters too much to expect a clear and correct answer from reason alone.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
You're not using reason Mike. You haven't even started.

Ashkenazi intelligence is entirely explicable by evolutionary theory.

There is only ONE human lineage.

And you're SO right in ways that you are blind to that sin has muddied the waters.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
My definition of humanity is NOT 'ability to make promises, make laws, and marry'. Those are some of my approaches to identifying humans - those are some of the uniquely human traits I can identify from the Bible (…) Please, please, please, work on understanding the difference between a definition and a means for identification.

---

I accept there’s a difference between the two… but I don’t see how it makes any difference to the way you are arguing here.

While the “promises-marriage-laws” criteria may not be a “definition” of “human humanity” for you, you have consistently used it on this thread as a criteria for excluding arguably human activity from being so.

Among all your "many approaches to identifying humans" (which you conveniently leave unsaid at this point), if no evidence of “promises-marriage-laws” exists, your default position is that any activity, no matter how human-like, isn’t (at least if it’s before 4000 BC).

If these “promises-marriage-laws” criteria of yours can’t be applied, you assume absence of “human” humanity - because your entire theory relies absolutely on taking this option.

Meanwhile, I await your response to my comments a) that Scripture is completely silent about your alleged dual origin of humanity b) that this ‘dual origin’ opens the door to the prospect of a ‘master race’ (or at the very least, people who have more of Adam’s blood in them than those who have to put up with being the mere descendents of upgraded-to-fallen ex-sub-humans).

[As a side issue, I’m wondering what form or sense marriage vows might have in the garden of Eden (“till death us do part”? um…; “forsaking all other”? umm, which other? and so on) and indeed wondering what might be the sense or need of a promise prior to the fall.]
 

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Posted by ken (# 2460) on :
 
The trouble is we end up with an invisible difference between "real humans" and all the rest.

So its sort of circular - you can spot these "real" Adamic ones because they can respond to God, but by no biological or cultural feature. So if someone does respond to God it proves they are part of that group. And if they don't, obviously they never were.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by ken:
you can spot these "real" Adamic ones because they can respond to God

---

I'm not sure MikeRussell can. Evidence of belief in the afterlife or forms of worship doesn't seem to be enough for him.
 

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Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:

The important reason to go to the Bible for the definition of humanity is that a portion of the definition is such that we are likely to suppress it or warp it in our sinfulness.

---

Using your line of reasoning here (which I don't agree with, but just for the sake of argument I'll play along), how do you know that your own interpretation of the Bible isn't warped by sinfulness? How can you trust what your mind finds there?

And what do you mean by "a portion of the definition is such that we are likely to suppress it"?? What portion is this? How do you know it exists if it's suppressed?

quote:

---

It's even possible that some of the definition of human and means of identification of human is not known to us at all, so it's not that we're suppressing it, but rather that we can't know it apart from revelation. In this case, looking at the Bible is clearly essential. Even if this is not the case, due to our sin, the Bible is essential on this question.

---

What makes the definition of humanity so different from other knowledge that we shouldn't be able to figure it out using other sources as well as the Bible? Again, you are open to extra-biblical knowledge in other areas, why not here? You earlier cited the example of elephants mourning to support your point about "identifying" human activity, and I don't recall anything about elephant death rituals in the Bible. You accept the existence of Cro-Magnons -- again, not mentioned in the Bible. So, why the heck do the "identifying traits" of humanity have to be spelled out in the Bible?

Your position is fundamentally, unredeemably, inconsistent. I've put in my 2 cents, but I don't have the mental energy to try to follow your argument any further.


 

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Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by koshatnik:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Lothiriel:
I agree with Eutychus -- the biblical definition of humanity is 'the image of God'. And what do we see God doing (especially in Genesis, which is where we are told about the image of God)? God makes things. And, as creatures made to be like God, we make things -- we draw pictures, form sculptures, make up stories and music, plant gardens and so on and so on. We do these things not because we're programmed to do them, as bees are programmed to build hives, but because we want to -- we choose to make things, make them as beautiful as we can, and call them 'good', just like God does.

---

I found this wonderful. Thanks.

---

Thank you!
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Well thanks for coming this far, anyway Lothiriel.

On reflection, I want to concede that I have indeed made a significant error in attempting to apply 'sola Scriptura' to the identification marks of humans, in the way I have.

Your probing has helped me see this, Lothiriel.
My apologies to those who have been turned off the debate through my errors in this regard.

I certainly concede that we are able to postulate identification marks for humans, that do not appear in the Bible.

I would not back away from my attempt to outline a version of Calvin's 'noetic effects of sin' - that our sin does effect our ability to reason.
Nevertheless, I have applied it poorly.
I would prefer to say this:

The identification markers for humans that we can deduce from the Bible will be completely trustworthy. (Of course, we will need to work at making sure we have rightly understood the Bible).
We can also identify markers for identifying humans from outside the Bible.

Okay, so I've gotten the idea that the average reader around here is miles to the left of me, and I'm not sure if I've struck a single Calvinist along the way. So I don't imagine there's much empathy with this wrong-headed thinking I've displayed here.

Nevertheless, some might be willing to keep following the thread. A big thanks to contributors, I'm being helped substantially. Perhaps others are finding this useful too.

But it brings me to Lothiriel's claim, is creativity a true marker for uniquely identifying humans?

In reading 'The Ape at the Brink of the Human mind', I find it hard not to see significant creativity in the description of interaction with the apes, as they learnt to communicate with each other. Can you (Lothiriel, or any one who wants to support his criterion for human identification) be more precise about what kind of creativity is uniquely human?
 

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Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 
Well, I must say that I have never known anyone willing to admit they may need to rethink their position (including myself) as you have, MikeRussell. I am impressed.

All the examples I gave earlier -- painting, sculpture, music, literature, ornamental gardening -- are examples of art. AFAIK, no other creature makes art. We seem to be unique in seeking to create things that impart truth and beauty.

You cited the example of chimps and apes learning language and appearing to be using it in novel ways. Many linguists and psychologists find that claims about apes learning language and being creative with it are exaggerated. One striking contrast between apes using language and humans using language is that apes require a great deal of explicit training to learn very little, while human children acquire language without any deliberate training at all. In fact, children deprived of language will invent a language for themselves -- this was seen in a group of deaf children who were not exposed to sign language, so they invented their own very sophisticated sign language.

It might be argued that the difference between humans and apes using language is a difference in degree rather than in kind, and that given a few millennia of further evolution apes might be as adept at language as we are now. This type of thinking certainly would have implications for identifying humanity. Other things to think about along this line would be abstract thinking, self-awareness, awareness of the passage of time -- all of these are inherent in our use of language. I don't want to start a long treatise on these matters, but they warrant consideration when talking about language.

So I'm sticking with art as a key identifier of humanity. And don't forget about those ancient cave paintings!
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
I'm not sure if I've struck a single Calvinist along the way.

---

Calvinist? I'm intruigued. What would have made you sure?
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Let me make a couple of further reflections in response to Lothiriel:

It seems right to say that no 'advanced art' has been found produced by modern animals.
However, some modern animals do seem to have ability to produce 'art' in a more limited fashion. I'm thinking for example of the apes making a 'funny face' and 'laughing' as a result, or of putting a bowl on their head and 'laughing'. This plays on their working with 'image', and with what is 'fitting', which could be described as art in a certain sense.

But the degree to which modern animals could express their creativity is considerably different from the ancient Homo sapiens who produced detailed cave art.

So if one wants to hold my thesis, it is necessary to say the following: that the last pre-human Homo sapiens were by a considerable margin the most advanced non-humans ever to live on the planet. That the lack of advanced art by modern animals is not a water-tight proof that ancient animals could not produce such art.

It might be the case that the most advanced modern animals are considerably less advanced than it is possible for animals to be.

This may seem strained to some. However, I don't think it's a logical impossibility.

This raises the question how one could disprove my thesis. Is it falsifiable (an important element of any theory)? Well to falsify it, there are a few options:

1. show biologically that there was no new significant genetic inputs into humanity around 3900 BC (my proposed date for the entry of Cain) in the area of Mesopotamia

or

2. show biologically that there was no new significant genetic input into humans and animals around 2300 BC (my proposed date for the entry of Noah's ark) in the area of Mt. Ararat.

or

3. Find a unique trait of humanity that is undeniable and show that Homo sapiens had it before 4000 B.C.
The easiest way to do this is to deduce from the Bible a trait which is uniquely human, and show humans had it before 4000 B.C.
(You can see I'm still struggling with this question of how to integrate the Bible's authority into the question of the falsifiability of my thesis.)
If you want to falsify my thesis, the only way I can see to avoid my response 'animals were more advanced in those days than they are now' is using the Bible, but there may be another way which I can't think of. Feel free to try.

4. Show that my theory is inconsistent with the Bible's teaching.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
4. Show that my theory is inconsistent with the Bible's teaching.

---

I'm feeling ignored.

The utterly foundational message of the earliest chapters of Genesis is that we have a single common origin: whether a single couple or not, the overwhelming idea is of one humanity, whose unifying and unique characterstic is that it is created in the image of God.

I find it hard to accept the prospect of this foundational state of affairs being as radically revised as you suggest without further comment in Scripture.

Your theory apparently calls for two independent, morally distinct origins of contemporary humanity: Adam and Eve (originally human) plus the previously sub-human humans who were endowed with humanity after the Fall.

I put it to you (again) that the implications of a theory of dual origins for humanity are simply so enormous as to make the lack of reference to them in Scripture completely implausible, besides robbing many passages of any sense (if your theory were true, what possible sense would there be in Paul's comparisons between the "first Adam", the "second Adam", "as in Adam... as in Christ" and so on?).
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Eutychus

I'm not trying to ignore you. It's just a time issue of getting around to you, believe me. I do value your input, and see you as putting more effort into thinking and responding than anyone else here.

To see the two different biologically distinct strains of humanity in the Bible, you can go to:

Cain's wife, the city he built and the people he feared,

And you can go to:

the fact that for a short amount of time (post Flood) there were a small number of high longevity people in the midst of a large number of normal longevity people - I think the best way to explain this is by reference to a dual biological source of humanity.

For more on this second piece of Scriptural evidence, see my article
http://originofhumanity.blogspot.com/p/draft-journal-article.html

I want to have a good crack at the master-race critique, but that might have to wait till after youth group and church.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Eutychus

I'm very pleased you raise the 'second Adam' point.
Both Adam and Christ are our federal heads.

There are different ways of understanding this, with regard to Adam:
Some take a biological approach to our original sin and our being 'in Adam'. They might use the analogy of Levi paying the tithe through Abraham to Melchizedek, and say - just like that, we are in Adam, sinning in him, as we were in the body of our ancestor when he sinned.

But you don't have to take such a view of Adam's headship over humanity.
To see this most clearly, note that Jesus is the federal head of all Christians, yet we are not descended from him biologically.

If that can be true of Jesus, why not of Adam?
I discuss this in my lengthy thesis, fwiw
 

---

Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
And a third effort, just so you don't feel ignored, Eutychus:

I'm a Calvinist, if I'm going to describe what kind of theology I have, I'll go for Reformed, or Calvinist, which are basically the same thing in my parlance.

There are different kinds of Calvinist, but basically I was saying earlier, I don't see many in this thread who think like me -
of course this is true regarding my thesis, which nobody accepts outside some of my close friends and family. But there are many Reformed Christians in the world, and in general, the methods and presuppositions of those on this thread don't give me the 'vibe' that there are many, if any here, who would call themselves 'Calvinist' or 'Reformed'.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@ken
There's no invisible difference between pre-human Homo sapiens and the 'real humans'.

I'm sure the difference would be vast, if you tried to talk to one of the pre-humans. Not being able to make promises must carry with it all sorts of other issues in communication and thinking. You could definitely tell the difference.

But of course, the pre-human Homo sapiens never met the real humans, so it's purely hypothetical
 

---

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
To see the two different biologically distinct strains of humanity in the Bible, you can go to:

Cain's wife, the city he built and the people he feared,

And you can go to:

the fact that for a short amount of time (post Flood) there were a small number of high longevity people in the midst of a large number of normal longevity people - I think the best way to explain this is by reference to a dual biological source of humanity.

---

and

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
But of course, the pre-human Homo sapiens never met the real humans, so it's purely hypothetical

---

Am I seeing an internal contradition here?

Apart from that, I'm not generally one for self-referential but shouldn't this thread be flagged up in the Fruitcake Zone?
 

---

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
To see the two different biologically distinct strains of humanity in the Bible, you can go to:

Cain's wife, the city he built and the people he feared,

And you can go to:

the fact that for a short amount of time (post Flood) there were a small number of high longevity people in the midst of a large number of normal longevity people - I think the best way to explain this is by reference to a dual biological source of humanity.

---

and

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
But of course, the pre-human Homo sapiens never met the real humans, so it's purely hypothetical

---

Am I seeing an internal contradition here?

---

You're not paying attention . According to MikeRussell's theory, the "real humans" (Adam, Eve and Cain) mingled with the "pre-human Homo sapiens"... but only after the latter had become "real humans" themselves. Albeit less long-lived, and having gone straight from "pre-human" to "fallen human" without the "unfallen human" bit in Eden.

More later...
 

---

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :
 
Ah yes, I do remember that bit, when his all-loving God promoted them from pre-human innocence to fallen hell-fodder without even a by your leave.

Actually I think you're also forgetting that it wasn't Adam and Eve who mingled with the post-pre-humans but Noah, his family and a large ark of animals. I wonder if that means the pre-humans got their milk from pre-bovines?
 

---

Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Let me make a couple of further reflections in response to Lothiriel:

It seems right to say that no 'advanced art' has been found produced by modern animals.
However, some modern animals do seem to have ability to produce 'art' in a more limited fashion. I'm thinking for example of the apes making a 'funny face' and 'laughing' as a result, or of putting a bowl on their head and 'laughing'. This plays on their working with 'image', and with what is 'fitting', which could be described as art in a certain sense.

---

Art? No - those apes are playing games. My dog plays games, lots of animals play games. Games are not art. Art is yearning for, and seeking to represent, beauty and truth. Or maybe I should say beauty or truth, because, as you will no doubt agree, sometimes in our sin-stained world, truth can be ugly.

quote:

---

3. Find a unique trait of humanity that is undeniable and show that Homo sapiens had it before 4000 B.C.
The easiest way to do this is to deduce from the Bible a trait which is uniquely human, and show humans had it before 4000 B.C.
(You can see I'm still struggling with this question of how to integrate the Bible's authority into the question of the falsifiability of my thesis.)

---

But here we go again with restricting ourselves to the Bible as a reference for human traits.

The Bible itself tells us, over and over, to look around at the created world to help us understand God and ourselves.

Again, art. Again, cave paintings, decorated pottery, jewellery -- much of it over 6000 years old.

quote:

---

If you want to falsify my thesis, the only way I can see to avoid my response 'animals were more advanced in those days than they are now' is using the Bible, but there may be another way which I can't think of. Feel free to try.

---

This is a red herring, I think. As far as I can understand your argument here (and I admit it may not be very far) you are saying that Cro-Magnons were more advanced than animals are today, but still not human. But comparing Cro-Magnons to present-day animals is meaningless -- it's apples and oranges (or more like apples and baseball bats).

The Bible is strangely silent on the topic of animal intelligence. By restricting proof or disproof to the Bible this argument is clearly outside the realm of verifiable evidence, and is pure fantasy.
 

---

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by Pre-cambrian:
I think you're also forgetting that it wasn't Adam and Eve who mingled with the post-pre-humans but Noah

---

I think he thinks it's Cain, 'cos that's where he got his wife and that's why he was afraid of being killed when he was expelled to the land of Nod.
 

---

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
You are typically imparsimonious Mike.

Cain's wife was his sister or niece or other degree of cousin.

You can't do this as you can't even start. You're not even wrong.

And you're a damnationist.

[ 17. February 2011, 17:16: Message edited by: Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard ]
 

---

Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Your ideas are not theoretical in the slightest and not subject to falsifiability.
 

---

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
To see the two different biologically distinct strains of humanity in the Bible, you can go to:

Cain's wife, the city he built and the people he feared,

---

That doesn't require "two different biologically distinct strains of humanity". It only requires there to be other people around that aren't mentioned in the creation narrative.

quote:

---

for a short amount of time (post Flood) there were a small number of high longevity people in the midst of a large number of normal longevity people - I think the best way to explain this is by reference to a dual biological source of humanity.

---

Again, it seems to me that to explain that in this way is an assumption too far. You lose far more than you gain.

quote:

---

Both Adam and Christ are our federal heads (...)
To see this most clearly, note that Jesus is the federal head of all Christians, yet we are not descended from him biologically.

---

The doctrine of federal headship allows for the possibility of not all humans being biologically descended from Adam.

It absolutely doesn't require those humans to have arrived at their status as humans by such radically differing routes as you propose. If anything, I would say it argues against it.

How can Adam possibly be taken as a representative of a contemporaneous group to which, as a "real" rather than "pre" human, he does not belong? (Or, to put it the other way round, why not make him federal head of the chimpanzees, rabbits, and so on, as well?).

I think the example of Christ as christians' federal head makes this problem even worse for you. Paul in particular spends pages and pages arguing that Jew and Gentile are fundamentally in the same condition before God and will be saved by the same means.

His emphasis is on the oneness of the human race, its fallenness as epitomised by one man, and its redemption as epitomised and achieved by one man. This whole imagery falls flat on its face if there are two "humanities" out there.

If the truth was that humanity is in effect two distinct races divinely grafted into one (if I can summarise your theory that way) and we can legitimately expect Scripture to bear witness to this truth, why on earth doesn't that get at least a passing mention by Paul in Romans 11 when he's going on about the wild and natural olive?

If what you theorise is true, why didn't he write something like "even as the LORD grafted in the pre-humans into the human race when Adam fell, even so shall the estranged Jews be grafted into the new humanity in Christ"?

Like I say, this theory of yours is too portentous to be sustainable on the basis of indirect evidence alone. It's so foundational it would have to be explicit.

[forgot to add: I'm not sure how to self-describe these days, but I think I'm a lot more of a calvinist than I am an Arminian...]

[ 17. February 2011, 18:18: Message edited by: Eutychus ]
 

---

Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Martin

'And you're a damnationist.'

What are you trying to achieve with this point? I submit to you that insults like this are unhelpful, because they have no content. You need to say what's wrong with thinking there's a hell where people actually will go, rather than use an appellation like this to insult. Why would you bother?

Quite similar is pre-Cambrian's comment on the Fruitcake zone. Who are you trying to impress? What's the point of such an insult? Quite likely part of the point is that you don't want to put time into engaging constructively, because that is hard work.
 

---

Posted by Louise (# 30) on :
 
hosting

Mike,

Martin PC Not has had a previous warning for this, so I've referred the matter up to the admins.

Pre-cambrian's comment is within the guidelines for this board, people are perfectly entitled to say a thread or a post should be in the fruitcake zone part of the site, so long as they don't directly post 'You are a fruitcake' or a similar direct insult to the person rather than to the ideas expressed/matter posted.

If however you want to get personal with either poster, then you need to open a thread on the Hell board which is the only board where people are allowed to pursue personal conflicts/attacks.

Queries about hosting decisions belong on The Styx board.

Thanks,
Louise
Dead Horses host

hosting off
 

---

Posted by Alan Cresswell (# 31) on :
 
And, here is the earlier warnng. I'd say the important part is:

quote:

---

If you [Martin] post personal comments on other posters which are not unambiguously neutral or positive, I will count them as C3 or C4 violations.

---

Martin,

You have now added Commandment 6 to the list of violations. If you post another personal comment that is not unambiguously neutral or positive anywhere on the Ship (except in Hell) you will have earnt yourself some shore leave.

Alan
Ship of Fools Admin
 

---

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Quite similar is pre-Cambrian's comment on the Fruitcake zone. Who are you trying to impress? What's the point of such an insult? Quite likely part of the point is that you don't want to put time into engaging constructively, because that is hard work.

---

On the contrary some ideas are so way out that they don't justify work being spent on them, and engaging "constructively" risks lending them an air of intellectual respectability which they don't deserve. To be honest I'm amazed that so many people here are prepared to engage with this idea.

I note that you also presume to know what my motive is. That shouldn't surprise me as you have already presumed to know the spiritual state of people like me, i.e. atheists or agnostics.
 

---

Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Mike, there are Calvinists aboard Ship but probably not many posting on this particular thread. Ken and Eutychus certainly have Calvinistic 'genes' and so have I, but I've gradually moved away from a Calvinistic position as I find it too reductionist if taken too far.

Some of Calvin rings true, certainly, but I don't think he had the last word on the matter. Nor do I think he'd be that happy with how subsequent Calvinists have often taken his ideas and developed them beyond where he was prepared to go.

For my money, though, you're barking up the wrong tree in the way you're trying to 'fit' scripture into your schema.

To pick up, though, on something you said about the ages of patriarchs and other OT figures not being symbolic. I came across a Rabbinical quote the other day that demonstrates that the Jews did interpret some of these ages in symbolic or mythological terms. I'm not saying they were right or wrong, just that it is possible to interpret some of these figures that way.
 

---

Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Well I'm back from a big weekend (my wife was away, and I had the four kids).

So, here we go:

@Gamaliel
Do you have a reference for those Jewish understandings of the genealogies? I'm interested.

@Lothiriel
Do you have a book title within mainstream scholarship (perhaps in anthropology) that makes an argument for certain characteristics being uniquely human? Especially one that argues for abstract thinking, self-awareness, awareness of the passage of time, art, and creativity as being uniquely human traits? I’d love to take a look.

@Eutychus
Thanks for being such a long-standing thoughtful contributor here.

Let me start by disputing your argument from silence. You say that if my theory were true (and a humanity was grafted in which was not descended from Adam), there would have been a statement in the Bible analogous with Paul’s ‘grafting in’ of the Gentiles.

By the same style of argument, I could note the absence of a clear statement that we are a biological unity. I could ask why original sin is not stated in terms of biology. The parallel would be Hebrews 7: ‘One might even say that Levi, who collects the tenth, paid the tenth through Abraham, because when Melchizedek met Abraham, Levi was still in the body of his ancestor’.
So the Bible knows how to speak of the intergenerational imputation of actions by virtue of biological descent. If Adam were the biological father of us all, surely original sin would be transmitted like this. Why then doesn’t Paul argue like this in Romans 5? Why doesn’t he say, ‘we sinned through Adam, because when Adam sinned, we were still in the body of our ancestor?’ According to your form of argument, the answer would be ‘because he wasn’t the ancestor of us all’.

I reject the form of argument. The fact is that arguments from silence like this (both yours and mine) are inconclusive.

You ask: How can Adam possibly be taken as a representative of a contemporaneous group to which, as a "real" rather than "pre" human, he does not belong? (Or, to put it the other way round, why not make him federal head of the chimpanzees, rabbits, and so on, as well?).

How can Adam be a representative of a group to which he does not belong? Of course he doesn’t belong to ‘pre-humans group’ before they were made human! If he belonged to that group, he wouldn’t be the representative head! Why didn’t God make him federal head of rabbits as well? God had overseen the evolutionary process so that only Homo sapiens had evolved to just the right point, at that time, that they were ready to become human. God hadn’t done that with rabbits. But the Homo sapiens still lacked something – a human soul, including certain traits and abilities and dignities which are required to be human. God endowed the pre-human Homo sapiens with what they lacked, taking the model from (fallen) Adam. Thus Adam became the representative head.

It would be useful here to look at the various passages that assert Adam’s headship:
Romans 5:12 ‘just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned-’

Non-biological understanding of this passage is very possible. Adam sinned, and that’s why he died both spiritually, and later physically. Death came to all, because the humanity we all received (modelled on Adam’s) was a humanity which was habitually sinful. The implied truth here is that no sinless human can be overcome by death. But by virtue of the sinful humanity we all possess (inherited from Adam), we all die.

Note as an aside that the statement ‘death entered the world through sin’ is a problem for standard understandings of this passage. Animals in our world died before the time of Adam. So how can it be true that death entered the world through sin? My dual-world theory has a good answer: the ‘world’ here primarily refers to the world of Adam-through-Noah. Death did not enter that world until Adam sinned.

Other passages in Romans 5:12-21 could be considered:
‘the many died by the trespass of the one man’
‘by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man’
‘one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people’

None of these require a biological headship of Adam – all can be understood through my theory.

1 Corinthians 15:49 ‘we have borne the image of the earthly man’
The pre-human Homo sapiens did not bear Adam’s image, since they did not have a human soul, or the ability to make promises, or to marry, and they lacked various other unspecified characteristics and dignities associated with being human.

Do you have a verse, Eutychus, regarding Adam’s representative headship, which my theory can not embrace? If not, we have to conclude that my theory is still tenable.
 

---

Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Eutychus

So what about your ‘master-race’ critique? Are there some who have more Adamic blood than others? Yes. The Jews would be the most obvious candidates. Does that mean, the more Adamic blood you have the ‘better’ the human you are? No. Humanity is equally bestowed on all, since we are all in Adam’s image (1 Cor. 15:49) and therefore all in God’s image. Does it mean some people are more likely to be ‘gifted’ in certain areas, according to how much Adamic blood they have? Yes. I suspect evolution might produce better warriors, more gifted athletes, more ability to cope with danger, more ability to empathize well with those who are suffering, as well as various other useful giftings. I suspect descent from Adam will more likely produce other giftings. High intelligence may be one, but I’m guessing.
It is quite possible, (as you assume), that descent (or not) from Adam is one contributor to the origins of race. But clearly there are more races than just two, and so the picture is more complex than that. Note that evolutionary theories all struggle with how to address the question of race, and are all in danger of concluding that one race might be superior to the other. Indeed, I see no security in atheistic evolutionary accounts for a common humanity. This is because the racial split of humanity is dated well before the arrival of traits we consider essential in marking out humans. So how can a single humanity be secured in such a system? I don’t think it can. At least my theory secures a common and equal humanity for Homo sapiens.
The fact that different races have different giftings is reminiscent of the Biblical image of the church ‘body’ having different members. All races are essential, although they differ. This richness is good, not bad. Intelligence is good, but it’s not the only thing. Musical skill and rhythm is good, but it’s not the only thing. Social empathy for those who suffer is good, but it’s not the only thing. Likewise leadership skills, and so on. I think some races will be stronger in some of these, and some races weaker, on average. But of course, it’s an average. Each race will have individuals who are far stronger than the average of their race. So all the spiritual gifts (and other gifts) are available within all the races.
Your critique is an important one. But in the end, I think there are answers which can adequately defend my theory.
 

---

Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:

@Lothiriel
Do you have a book title within mainstream scholarship (perhaps in anthropology) that makes an argument for certain characteristics being uniquely human? Especially one that argues for abstract thinking, self-awareness, awareness of the passage of time, art, and creativity as being uniquely human traits? I’d love to take a look.

---

There may well be such a book out there, but I don't have a title to give you. I would guess, though, that you'd want to look at psychology texts first -- psychology deals more directly with these things than does anthropology. You'll probably come across interesting studies that tell of the unusual intelligence of dolphins and chimpanzees. It would be nice to think that somewhere there was a nice little checklist that clearly demarcated humans from their near evolutionary relatives (or even more distant ones), but it probably doesn't exist. It may be a matter of degree, rather than kind. It may require looking at a big picture, rather than a discrete list of traits.

To put it again, very simply (I hope!) my point in mentioning art is that a) we don't see it (at least not anything that looks like art to us) made by other creatures, and b) it has been produced for more than 6,000 years.

My goal is not to help you refine your checklist of human traits, but to show that your theory falls apart in light of the evidence of archaeological art. Whether the other traits are uniquely human, I don't know -- probably taken individually, not as uniquely human as we would like to think. But art does seem to be uniquely human.
 

---

Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 
Oh, and sorry, missed the edit window -- abstract thinking, self-awareness, etc, were things I mentioned specifically in connection with language. I wasn't listing them as unique human traits, since the studies of ape language showed some evidence of them. But they, in aggregate, they do help set us apart from animals (at least, that's what I tell my dog).
 

---

Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi Lothiriel,
I think we're outlined our disagreement on whether Cro-Magnon art debunks my thesis, but I will restate.

I concede that the is no animal art today. It doesn't mean that the most advanced pre-humans couldn't have drawn art. It just means no animals are that advanced today.

I know you don't like that conclusion, and it has to do with method. But I don't at all feel forced to abandon my thesis on that score.
 

---

Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:

@Lothiriel
Do you have a book title within mainstream scholarship (perhaps in anthropology) that makes an argument for certain characteristics being uniquely human? Especially one that argues for abstract thinking, self-awareness, awareness of the passage of time, art, and creativity as being uniquely human traits? I’d love to take a look.

---

The Symbolic Species by Terence Deacon.
 

---

Posted by Lothiriel (# 15561) on :
 

quote:

---

Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Hi Lothiriel,
I think we're outlined our disagreement on whether Cro-Magnon art debunks my thesis, but I will restate.

I concede that the is no animal art today. It doesn't mean that the most advanced pre-humans couldn't have drawn art. It just means no animals are that advanced today.

I know you don't like that conclusion, and it has to do with method. But I don't at all feel forced to abandon my thesis on that score.

---

But the argument is circular. You begin with the thesis that there were no humans before 4000 BC. Thus any art appearing before 4000 BC was made by non-humans. They must have been non-humans because there were no humans at that time.

It's difficult to consider a hypothesis that depends on an absence of evidence (e.g. absence of writing, law, art, whatever) as intellectually rigorous. You're free to think whatever you want, of course, but if you want to convince others, you need solid evidence and solid reasoning.

And going back to the criteria of the development of writing -- the Tartaria Tablets contain a very early form of symbolic script that has been radiocarbon-dated to the 5th or 6th millennium BC. This date is not the same as that of the fossils found with the tablets, however, but it is intriguing.
 

---

Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
During the silence on this thread I have taken the debate on federal headship and what it means to Purgatory where better minds than mine can have at it.

Whatever the outcome, 'federal headship' does not require a dual humanity. I can see how by your lights it might allow for it, but it certainly doesn't require it. All it requires is that God chose one individual (or one individual couple? but there's a whole sub-debate right there) to stand for humanity as a whole.

It doesn't require them to be fundamentally, morally different from all the "pre-humans" around them. The only thing which requires that is your insistence on dating Adam to c.4000 BC. Do you see that?

I don't have time right now to interact with everything you say line by line, but this caught my attention (emphasis mine):

quote:

---

My dual-world theory has a good answer: the ‘world’ here primarily refers to the world of Adam-through-Noah. Death did not enter that world until Adam sinned.

---

Your use of "primarily" and your need to write "that world" rather than what the text actually says ("the world") should alert you to the fact that you are on shaky ground.

I don't know how often you engage with Jehovah's Witnesses, but this is exactly the kind of logic they deploy when a verse doesn't quite fit their hyperdispensational view of Scripture. They simply say "ah, that refers to the heavenly hope, not the earthly hope". By taking this approach they basically decree entire chunks of Scripture to be completely irrelevant.

They say this not on the grounds of exegesis, but on the grounds of their overarching hermeneutic, which to my mind squeezes the Bible to fit their wonky theology. The problem is that even if we're not JWs, we all do this to some extent, and I think you are doing so here. If you (or I) want to be intellectually honest we should try to desist when we find ourselves doing it!

Besides, the Rom 5 passage is difficult, partly because Paul interrupts himself mid-sentence (see the Purg thread) which is another reason to exercise caution about how it's used.

A final thought (for now) on the "master race". Your "dual humanity" theory is more insidious than the "plethora of ancestors" theory because it presents a clear demarcation of superior quality humans compared to previously pre-humans, not simply a broad diversity.

You try to get away from this by pleading that characteristics such as intelligence do not demonstrate superiority, but one of the planks of your opening argument was the fact that the descendents of Adam, the "pure" humans, enjoy such massive longevity.

It's hard to read this any other way (especially in your opening posts on this thread) than in terms of some form of superiority.

Would anything lead you to re-examine the idea that those generations and ages in early Genesis were strictly literal and complete?
 

---

Posted by Gamaliel (# 812) on :
 
Mike ... the only Jewish reference I can give you at the moment is Jonathan Margonet's 'A Rabbi Looks At the Psalms' - which I've read in preparation for a Lent study course.

I have come across Jewish references both here, aboard Ship, and in my real life reading that indicates that even first century Jews did not always understand scripture in the way that Protestant evangelical fundamentalists insist that it should be taken.

I suspect it'd be difficult to find one concise, over-arching Jewish system of interpretation. They believed that scripture had infinite capacity for interpretation/reinterpretation - hence the Midrash and all the many and varied Rabbinical commentaries etc etc.

Once again, I suspect that your approach and thesis represents a very 'Western' and modernist mindset ... the attempt to find a one-size-fits-all solution. It's a very post-Enlightenment and Modernist approach ... which is the background that contemporary Protestant fundamentalism arose from.

That's not to say that your dating system is a modernist one - Bishop Ussher was proposing 4004BC as the date for Creation back in the 17th century. But I suppose it could be ... as Modernism was coming into play around then.
 

---

Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Eutychus

Those are helpful comments of yours regarding overarching interpretive grids.

It's good to reflect on whether it's just the 4000 BC Adam that drives me. I don't think it's just the genealogies that are pushing me to my position.

The second major reason (second in terms of what convinces me) I am holding this theory at present is the Flood. I can not escape it being global in the Scripture, yet clearly the world we live in was never completely inundated.

Combine that observation from our world with the observations from the text about the stark changes pre-versus-post-Flood, and my two worlds thesis comes out.

I haven't seen anyone posit to my satisfaction a better explanation for why the ages of the patriarchs only decline post-Flood, nor why carnivorous activity only begins post-Flood, nor why you seem to have a small number of 'oldies' in the midst of a large number of 'youngies' post-Flood.

In order, the third biggest reason I am holding on to my position is the Tower of Babel. The conclusion most people reach is that no implications can be drawn from the Tower story for the spread of language in the real world (our world). Mostly that's because we know things like the Australian Aborigines were in Australia 40000 BC, so their language must have been developed independently of any event which occurred c. 2000 BC in Mesopotamia. This historical data frankly contradicts the mainstream understandings of what the Biblical text is saying.
My thesis allows for the language scattered to be one of many in our world at the time, yet still the original language of the 'whole earth'. Thus under my reading there is a plausible connection between the text and the real world. This is a huge gain.

My fourth major reason (fourth in order of convincing me) is that I can't see that Eden could have been in our time-space continuum given it's meant to be a world of perfection. Our world has been full of earthquakes for millennia.

So it is not ONLY the genealogies, and the 4000 BC date that drives me, though that is top of the list. These four reasons cover Genesis 2, 3, 5, 6-9 and 11. I think I have provided improvement over the mainline view in all these areas. This is not a minor detail in the opening of the Bible.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 
All the reasons you give can be summed up much more simply: there is a disparity between reality and [your interpretation of your] Scripture, so to harmonize them you simply invent an alternate reality more to your liking. It's not surprising that this invention of your own convenience is unconvincing to others.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Well, I guess we'll see, Croesos. As genetic research continues, there will be more conclusions made about genetic inputs into humanity and animals. If significant genetic inputs to humanity and animals are found in the times and places I suggest, think of me
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
I don't think I see eye to eye with Croesos on much, but in this case, 'what he said'.

Something I find particularly intruiguing in your view is that you believe there "simply isn't enough evidence" for a global Flood and therefore reject it, whilst holding on to a 4000BC Adam. In my experience, people who are willing to take on board the first view usually don't have much difficulty doing without the latter.

(I have to say that looking at Scripture, for my part I find a universal Flood [or at least one that wiped out all of humanity] to be much nearer the intent of the text than a 4000BC Adam, though as explained upthread this is not the sort of thing I would go to the stake for or make a criterion of orthodoxy).
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
Well, I guess we'll see, Croesos. As genetic research continues, there will be more conclusions made about genetic inputs into humanity and animals. If significant genetic inputs to humanity and animals are found in the times and places I suggest, think of me

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Well, we already know quite a bit about genetics. Particularly human genetics, as we're a fairly self-obsessed species. There doesn't seem to be any sort of massive increase in genetic diversity centered on the Middle East in anything like the timeframe you're suggesting. As a fairly recent species we don't have all that much genetic diversity, and most of what we do have is centered in Africa. A similar situation seems to be the case with most animals, where centers of genetic diversity don't seem to be more likely found in the Middle East than anywhere else.

I guess what irritates me most about your position is its vagueness. It's the same "cold reading" technique used by psychics and other hucksters, where a prediction is kept vague enough that that they'll get credit for being right for a whole range of not terribly unlikely contingencies. So "something will be discovered about genetics at some point which will be somewhat related to my claims" is not a terribly convincing claim. What exactly do you expect to be found that will validate your view?
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
@Croesos

I'll admit to being a novice in the area of genetic diversity, and the mitochondrial DNA / Y chromosome research which seems to be the core of this area.
Those with expertise in the area might be able to take my theory and determine what it implies for genetics. My theory itself is very specific.

On a little further reflection, I suspect the content of genetic addition I am postulating (in c. 2300 BC and c. 4000 BC) would not imply a significant increase in genetic diversity at those times. I suspect the answer is that the entry of Cain and Noah's ark would produce barely any additional diversity, since there are such a small number of people and animals entering our world according to my theory.
What would be contributed is a unique, fresh source of human (and animal) DNA, not derived from evolution. I don't know how you'd test for that, I'm just saying that I suspect it's a different test from the tests of genetic diversity to which Croesos refers.

I don't think my theory is vague. I'm quite specific about what happened. I'm only vague on what kind of experiment could test my theory.
 

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Posted by Eutychus (# 3081) on :
 
Mike, I believe I haven't had an answer to either of these questions yet:

quote:

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Originally posted by Eutychus:
[Federal headship] doesn't require [Adam] to be fundamentally, morally different from all the "pre-humans" around them. The only thing which requires that is your insistence on dating Adam to c.4000 BC. Do you see that?

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or

quote:

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Would anything lead you to re-examine the idea that those generations and ages in early Genesis were strictly literal and complete?

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Any offers?
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi Eutychus,
I admire your staying power.

quote:

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[Federal headship] doesn't require [Adam] to be fundamentally, morally different from all the "pre-humans" around them. The only thing which requires that is your insistence on dating Adam to c.4000 BC. Do you see that?

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I disagree with your second sentence. Even if Adam is dated c. 100 000 BC, I would still want to say that Adam was fundamentally morally different from all the "pre-humans" around him.
There are two main reasons to say this: the first is the Bible's claim that Adam was the first human. The second is the acceptance that Homo sapiens evolved.

quote:

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Would anything lead you to re-examine the idea that those generations and ages in early Genesis were strictly literal and complete?

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Yes all my views are open to reassessment. The point of change will be when I feel that the arguments against my current system of belief are stronger than the arguments against a straight reading of the genealogies.

An example? A definitive genetic proof against what I'm saying would force me to abandon my current views. I'd probably move to see Genesis 1-11 as myth. I've outlined some of my objections to Genesis as myth, earlier. For now my objections to the mythical approach to Genesis are stronger than my concerns about my current theory. So I'm standing behind my theory, at least for now.
 

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Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
@Croesos

I'll admit to being a novice in the area of genetic diversity, and the mitochondrial DNA / Y chromosome research which seems to be the core of this area.
Those with expertise in the area might be able to take my theory and determine what it implies for genetics. My theory itself is very specific.

On a little further reflection, I suspect the content of genetic addition I am postulating (in c. 2300 BC and c. 4000 BC) would not imply a significant increase in genetic diversity at those times. I suspect the answer is that the entry of Cain and Noah's ark would produce barely any additional diversity, since there are such a small number of people and animals entering our world according to my theory.
What would be contributed is a unique, fresh source of human (and animal) DNA, not derived from evolution. I don't know how you'd test for that, I'm just saying that I suspect it's a different test from the tests of genetic diversity to which Croesos refers.

I don't think my theory is vague. I'm quite specific about what happened. I'm only vague on what kind of experiment could test my theory.

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Sounds to me like a need to take Genesis literally rather than a need to prove your theory. If you let go of that it will all be much clearer for you imo.
 

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Posted by Crœsos (# 238) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
. . . I don't know how you'd test for that, I'm just saying that I suspect it's a different test from the tests of genetic diversity to which Croesos refers.

I don't think my theory is vague. I'm quite specific about what happened. I'm only vague on what kind of experiment could test my theory.

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quote:

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Originally posted by MikeRussell:
An example? A definitive genetic proof against what I'm saying would force me to abandon my current views. I'd probably move to see Genesis 1-11 as myth.

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So in summary, you'd abandon your wild supposition in the face of evidence to the contrary, even though that supposition is (deliberately?) designed to be untestable? That's the kind of dishonest, shifty rationalization popular with Intelligent Design (a.k.a. Creationism Lite) advocates.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
Hi Mike. Thanks Alan. I was right as always. Mike, the only way I can come close to you is in Hell. Which will turn out to be just as much a waste of time as here I'm sure, but at least there there will be no holds barred. So, I cordially invite you to Hell Mike, I think that's a first for me. And you can surprise me by proving that you're not a damnationist for a start.

With enemies like me Mike, you don't need a friend.
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
Hi Martin, from an earlier brief perusal of a Hell board or two, I'm not at all convinced it will be an edifying experience. I don't see myself wanting to get sworn at, personally attacked etc. any time soon. Why would I accept a Hell-call, anyway?

To all readers,
I'm likely signing off at this point, though I will have a look from time to time on this thread, to see if there are substantive comments to interact with. Eutychus is especially likely to get a response if he posts again.... maybe on the Flood....

Anyway, thanks to all who contributed, especially to those who worked hard on their posts.
 

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Posted by Martin PC not & Ship's Biohazard (# 368) on :
 
I knew you'd do this Mike. I said so from the beginning.

Saying this should get me legalistically banned I'm sure.

You're worth it.

I will not swear at you in Hell. I will not be unfraternal to you there. I will defend you there. Protect you there. In the FULL spirit of François-Marie Arouet. It's only there that we can be free and open and witness.

Relational in Ship's company. You are a VALUED crew member.

So please join me in Hell.

You won't regret it, rough ride though it will be.

Your brother Martin
 

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Posted by MikeRussell (# 16191) on :
 
I keep getting hits from this old thread, but I've moved the page which the original post points to. If you want to read my views which this thread critiques, you'll be best to go to my site here:
https://sites.google.com/site/genesis111explored/

The original article is reproduced in modified form over a couple of pages here:
https://sites.google.com/site/genesis111explored/home/project-definition

Thanks
 

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