>Adam, of chapter two, as Dick Fischer has demonstrated to my satisfaction, was
>a historical person, created within the last 10,000 years, and introduced into
>an already-peopled world. The people that preceded Adam were the descendants
>of the "adam" of chapter one. Of course Adam bore the image of God, but it
>did not originate with him. What did originate with Adam and Eve went far
>beyond the image of God, into the beginning of a new higher relationship with
>God, a covenantal relationship, a relationship that was to eventuate in the
>redemption of the human race in the second Adam, Jesus Christ.
While I appreciate Dick's efforts and his raising of an important
possibility, I do not like the way such a view divides the human race into
two. My wife is a decendant of Adam under this point of view, I am not.
This is a perfect basis for people looking down on each other. Rather than
unifying the human race, it divides it.
The meaning
>and significance of Adam in chapter two would never have been discovered by
>naturalistic, materialistic science. Without God's revelation we would not
>have known about Adam the head of a redemptive lineage of human beings.
>
>To make Adam of chapter two the head of the human (adamic) lineage of chapter
>one is to introduce all kinds of unnecessary problems. The biblical problems
>I have cited above. The other major one is where does Adam's fatherhood
>begin? Since he was able to speak and name animals, he would have had to come
>after the enlarged Broca area was formed in *Homo habilis* the necessary brain
>structure for speech. Do you agree? This area of the brain probably did not
>develop overnight, so some very early human beings with slowly developing
>Broca areas or no Broca areas must have preceded him. Was he the father of
>pre-Broca humans? Or was he created with a preformed Broca area? Or you may
>have another alternative.
I probably should point out a view that Terrence Deacon suggests in The
Symbolic Species. He believes that Broca's area is the result of language
not the cause of it. In that view, Australopithecus would have spoken.
glenn
Adam, Apes, and Anthropology: Finding the Soul of Fossil Man
and
Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm