You wrote:
>
>You are speaking of times that are ten's of thousands of years ago,
>not 5 million, Glenn.
>
>>I would like to add that you are probably missing some information on
>> how useful a stone ax could be. The Bushmen of the Kalihari use stone
>> adzes for woodworking.
>
>Woodworking is not ark building.
But the Polynesians like the New Guineans had to use boats to travel to
where they are.
I wrote:
>>we have forgotten how
>>incredibly ingenious our "primitive" ancestors were.
Dick Replied:
>
>Chimpanzees can catch termites on a twig. An anthropologist, who
>observed for many hours, never could figure out how to do it.
>
I am uncertain of what you are trying to say here. And I am afraid to
guess.
>
>Further on that very point, I believe the genealogies in Genesis
> 11:10-26 and Luke 3:23-38 are prohibitive to positing a 5.5 million
>year-old flood.You would have normal father and son relationships from
>Abraham to Christ and maybe from Adam to Noah. But from Shem to
>Abraham, all of a sudden, you would have not only tens of thousands
>intermediate generations, they would even SPECIATE from Australopithicine
>to Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.
Jesus used the term "Son of Man". My dictionary defines "Adam" and "Man".
Thus Jesus was giving his genealogy with a gap of at least 4000 years.
And the Genealogies are most assuredly very incomplete. Assuming what you
say is true that the Flood was in 3000 B.C. David lived about 1000 B.C.
In Luke 3 there are 42 names between Jesus and David. This is an average
of 23 years per generation. If Abraham lived at 1800 B.C. there are only
13 names between David and Abe giving an average 61 year generation time.
Did the average man in 1600 B.C. have his first child at age 61?
There are only 10 names between Abraham and Noah. Since you believe that
this represents 1200 years, that is an average generation time of 120
years. Are you willing to say here and now that post flood Sumerians lived
lives of several hundred years and that their first born were born on
average when the old geezers were 120 years of age?
Assuming that people in the 1200 years between David and Abraham had the
same generation time as between David and Jesus, then the Luke Genealogy
represents 1/3 of the people who should be there. Between Abraham and
Noah, 1/5 of the necessary people. When you consider that people married
and had children younger these figures for the missing people should be
considered conservative.
That people are missing from the genealogies is no big surprise. The
question is how many people? Can you cite a verse that says no
geneological gap shall hold more than 5 people? The issue is not when the
people lived or how old they are. The issue is whether or not they were
real people.
I don't have a problem with long life spans as long as it is at the very
beginning just after humanity was created. But I know this, a 3000 B.C.
Noah didn't live a life of 950 years.
Considering the reported ages of the patriarchs, it appears to me that you
take seriously points in the scripture you are able to explain by yuur
view and don't mention the others.
Dick wrote:
>Glenn, I don't think you're going to find a lot of supporters.
I don't expect to. And that is not supposed to be the goal of a Christian.
If I can steal from what Paul said in Galatians 1:10,
"Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to
please men? If I were still trying to please men...", I would be a YEC.
They have 50% of the population believing their stuff and it it is all
wrong.
But I don't see any other view other than mine that actually explains the
physical events reported in the Scripture. What I want is a view that
explains ALL the facts not just the ones I want to explain or the ones
that are easy to explain. I don't think that a Mesopotamian flood which
dumps Noah into the Indian Ocean, which does not flood a town 7 miles
away, which depends on lands lacking the minerals described in Genesis 2,
can be said to be the event reported in the Scripture. You would think
that the true explanation of the event would explain some of those issues.
At least my view explains the event in a manner consistent with the
science of our day.
Christians often say that art is the sign of spiritual humanity. The
first art object is the Golan Venus (a statue of a naked lady) and it
comes from strata 330,000 years old! (see Desmond Morris, The Human
Animal, (New York: Crown Publishing, 1994), p. 186-188.)
No chimpanzee makes statues of the naked female form. This sounds
decidedly human. If art represents spirituality then spirituality has
been on our planet for at least 330,000 years.
There is also evidence that Homo erectus engaged in art-- body art.
"Ochre has no apparent practical or technological use until the
development of iron metallurgy sometime in the second millennium before
Christ when it becomes a principal ore for iron smelting. Nonetheless,
many of the Paleolithic period ochre specimens show evidence of having
been worked or utilized in some fashion. For example, the two lumps of
ochre recovered at Olduvai Gorge show signs of having been struck directly
by hammerstone blows (M. Leakey 1971). "D. Bruce Dickson, The Dawn of
Belief, (Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 1990), p. 42-43
Dickson goes on to point out (p. 44) that ochre was only used for body
painting. Thus it is quite likely that Homo erectus engaged in art.
If you open your definition of being able to recognize art, then
Australopithecus was able to do that.
Morris writes:
"As it so happened, my first book The Biology of Art, published many
years earlier, had been an attempt to trace the origins of the most
ancient of all forms of adult play and to see how, from biological roots,
the great tree of human art could blossom. The earliest evidence we have
of this activity is a staggering three million years old. In 1925 a
strange object was found in a rock shelter at a site known as the
Limeworks Quarry in the Transvaal in southern Africa. it was a
water-worn, reddish pebble that seemed curiously out of place.
Investigations revealed that it could not have come from the cave where it
was found and must have been carried from a location about three miles
away. What made it special was that it had the shape of a human skull, on
one side of which were small cavities that looked like a pair of sunken
eye-sockets above a simple mouth. There is no suggestion that this 'face'
had been artificially manufactured but its accidental resemblance is so
striking that it seems certain the object was collected and brought back
to a favoured dwelling place as a 'treasured possession'.
Known as the Makapansgat Pebble, after the site where it was found,it
is thought to be the most ancient art object in the world. What makes it
so extraordinary is that the cave where it was discovered was not occupied
by prehistoric man but by the early man-apes known as the
Australopithecines. They may not have been capable of fashioning a model
head themselves but they were at least able to see one in the natural
surface-weathering on a pebble and to be so impressed by the image that
they were moved to carry it home with them, over a long distance."Desmond
Morris, The Human Animal, (New York: Crown Publishing, 1994), p. 186-188.
As always with much respect,
glenn
Foundation,Fall and Flood
http://members.gnn.com/GRMorton/dmd.htm