> To do as most Christians do and excluded beings that behaved
>like us from the spiritual realm and try to make them non-spiritual animals
>is getting harder and harder to maintain. To make these beings non-spiritual
>requires that animals have the ability to master fire, make javelins
>balanced exactly as olympic javelins, make wooden planks, dig post holes,
>lay pavement, build huts and engage in various forms of art. All forms of
>Homo, erectus, Neanderthal and sapiens performed every one of these
>activities, yet old earth Christians do not want to call them human. Such a
>view seems to avoid the evidence of anthropology as much as young earth
>creationists avoid geological data.
One of the problems of paleoanthropology is defining the term man, human is
another problem. We can define Homo erectus, H. sapiens, etc., by bones and
most would include any Homo as being man, but what about Australopithecus
afarensis? The definition of man must be based on bones not artifacts or
culture.
Your definition of man seems to require the spiritual aspect and to date we
can not include that in our anthropological definition. The "spiritual"
aspect of man, I believe, came when God gave man the choice to obey Him or
to place self above God. When does this come into the paleonotological record?
I believe that our only indication of this comes by revelation in the
Genesis account of the Fall. The curse is given to a horticulturist or a
farmer, only a farmer or horticulturist has a problem with weeds (most are
editable and are used for various purposes by hunters and gathers). This
curse therefore appears to apply only to Homo sapiens, and then only to
those of the Holocene (and maybe not all of them).
In His Love,
John.
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John P. McKiness
P.O. Box 5666
Coralville, Iowa (U.S.A.) 52241
jmckines@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu
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