>Maybe it is because I have lived with this method of apology for nearly
>fifteen years that I am comfortable with it. Postulating Adam at the
>dawn of humanity tens of thousands, or even millions of years ago, does
>work for some. But this requires many hundreds if not thousands of
>missing relatives between Adam and Noah, and/or between Noah and Abraham
>who lived about 4,000 years ago.
>
>I know there is a line of reasoning that will permit missing generations,
>but the genealogies make the best sense when taken literally as father-son
>relationships.
I am not going to go into a detail by detail rebuttal, but I will note
this, that your assumption above is demonstrably wrong. And with it being
erroneous, the entire argument fails to be decisive. If you could prove
that every generation is demonstrably father-son then you would be correct.
But the Bible itself contradicts that. In Genesis 11:12-16 we have what
you claim is a father-son relationship. Ages are given for the age of the
father at birth etc. Here is the list
12 And Arphaxad lived five and thirty years, and begat Salah:
13 And Arphaxad lived after he begat Salah four hundred and three years,
and begat sons and daughters.
14 And Salah lived thirty years, and begat Eber:
15 And Salah lived after he begat Eber four hundred and three years, and
begat sons and daughters.
16 And Eber lived four and thirty years, and begat Peleg:
Yet in the earliest versions of Luke, we suddenly learn that there is
another guy in the lineage that is not mentioned. This demonstrably makes
the genealogies INCOMPLETE and not FATHER SON. Luke 3:35-36 says:
35 ...Heber, which was the son of Sala,
36 Which was the son of Cainan, which was the son of Arphaxad, which was
the son of Sem, which was the son of Noe, which was the son of Lamech,
Secondly, as you know the term 'son of' is used throughout the Bible as an
equivalent to 'ancestor of'. See William Henry Green, "Primeval
Chronology" in Robert C. Newman and Herman J. Eckelmann, Jr, Genesis One
and the Origin of the Earth," pp150-123
Secondly, I figure that you will say that Luke's Cainan is an addition, but
he is in the Septuagint which was translated from the original Hebrew much
earlier than any of our copies, it makes one wonder if we have lost a guy
in the genealogy of our text. My source for this is (Dick Fischer, The
Origins Solution, (Lima, Ohio: Fairway Press, 1996), p. 130)
this implies that Cainan was in the Hebrew text translated in the 3rd
century BC and implies that the copy we now have lost it somewhere between
then and our earliest extant copy of Genesis.
>... can we believe that Homo
>erectus called upon the name of the Lord?
yes, Homo erectus at Bilzingsleben Germany created a 27 foot diameter paved
area, placed a quartzite stone in the center of it, a bison horn on each
side of the alter and Mania and Mania found a smashed human skull at the
base of the quartzite stone. If this were found in a modern village, one
would have great fear about what gods these people worshiped.
"'They intentionally paved this area for cultural activities,' says Mania.
'We found here a large anvil of quartzite set between the horns of a huge
bison, near it were fractured human skulls.'" ~ Rick Gore, "The First
Europeans," National Geographic, July, 1997, p. 110
see also Robert G. Bednarik, "Concept-mediated Marking in the Lower
Palaeolithic," Current Anthropology, 36:4(1995), pp. 605-634, p. 611
"It is worth noting that Feustel has also mentioned marks on a
Bilzingsleben bone that may be the depiction of a large animals. If the
authors' view is correct, it is important that this 'animal figure' be
definitively disproved by them as soon as possible. On the other hand, if
Behm-Blancke and Feustel were correct, it would make Bilzingsleben even
more remarkable than it already is." ~ Paul G. Bahn, "Comments", Rock Art
Research 5:2(1988): 91-107, p. 96
>Granted, Christ was called "son of David," but
>that responds to the prophecy that the Messiah would come from the line
>of David. There is no good exegetical reason to believe that the
>genealogies in Genesis, Matthew and Luke can be expanded at will other
>than to fit a popular conception that Adam was the first human.
Well, calling Christ the 'son of man' also could be a reference to 'son of
Adam' and this would extend the use of 'son of' to quite a distance, so I
think your attempt to limit the 'son of' phraseology to 'father-son'
relationships is highly dubious.
>
>Glenn, my dear Christian brother, the totality of historical evidence
>falls on this one solution. Adam entered a populated world about 7,000
>years ago. If the question is: Where did biological man come from? -
>that is a science question. If the question is: Where did covenant man
>come from? - that is found in Genesis.
But as I have pointed out, the reason I can't accept your solution is
because it requires a flood in a location for which there is no physical
evidence of its occurrence, at a time for which there is no disruption and
requires water to go uphill carrying the ark from southern Iraq to Turkey,
a topographic rise of several thousand feet.
And then there is the fact that father-son relationships are not adherred
to throughout the Biblical genealogies.
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm