At 08:43 PM 3/14/00 EST, PHSEELY@aol.com wrote:
>Glenn,
>you wrote:
>
><< I have never held anything other than that Adam means man. God created
the
> man. It is later peoples that turned it into an actual name. >>
>
>George said:
>>>For all your useful compilations of data, we have no historical or
>paleontological or other data so finely focussed on the first human beings
>that enables us to say with any certainty that they were named Adam & Eve or
>that they ate from a forbidden tree or anything like that. Thus your claims
>to "accurate
>history" are vacuous. It's "coulda been", "not impossible" history.>>
>
>You answered:
>
><<The place we have one written record of Adam and Eve is from the Bible.
I will most assuredly claim that this was a different context than what you
are using it for now.
>I asked (admittedly without first checking your book), if you think the
story
>about the creation of Eve is accurate history?
>
>Your book indicates that you do regard that as accurate history. However,
>what about the man? In the biblical account, it is not just "dust" that
>becomes the first man, but that is "formed" into the man. Since "dust" is
>dirt (Gen 26:15) and the verb "form" is cognate with the noun "potter," the
>account is portraying God as a potter forming man's body out of the dirt.
You
>can, if taken in a very broad way, say that your scenario (a still-born ape
>fixed up by God) fits the account; but, I do not believe that the original
>writer or the original readers would have agreed that you are accepting the
>account as accurate history.
I agree that the original readers wouldn't have understood it that way. But
I would point out that the original readers of the messianic prophecies
didn't read those prophecies correctly either. So I don't see a big deal
about the altered view. 1st Century Jews didn't read the prophecies to
indicate Jesus either.
>
>I said,
>>Also, the account says Adam raised food in a garden;and that in his
>>lifetime, one of his sons did the same, and the other raised domesticated
>>animals. This is clearly Neolithic, that is to be dated no earlier than
>>10,000 BC. Does Glenn believe this is accurate history?
>
>You answered,
><Yes, once again, either read my book, read the web page or don't criticise
><what you are too lazy to read. I also have an article in the PSCF which
><approaches some of these issues.>>
>
>As best I can tell you are positing a Neolithic revolution in 2 to 5,000,000
>BC. However, I cannot find where this issue is clearly discussed in your
>book, nor does the index help.
>
>Best wishes even if you are temporarily mad at me.
Not mad, frustrated. You can find much of these issues in the section
entitled The collapse of technology, in the chapter entitled, Life after
Death.
What I am postulating is that God gave the primal parents and their
children the technology. It was then lost at the flood and not recovered
for several million years. This is based upon two things. First, complex
agricultural societies require lots of people because you need specialists
and secondly, the only example of an isolated society shows that they were
unable to maintain even a middle-paleolithic level of technology.
Here is something I posted on another list a few days ago about exactly
this issue.
>> Technology requires people, lots of people. I find oil for your cars,
you all do other things indirectly for me. I specialize in my
technology, you in yours. The farmer grows food for both of us. If we
were reduced to only a few people then our technological knowledge
would die. Consider the effects of such a population bottleneck. Do you
or 8 of your best friends know how to grow cotton, build a spindle and
a loom to make cloth? You need a plow to grow cotton, so lets make an
iron plow. Do you know what iron ore looks like? Do you know where to
look? Do you know where to look for coal? Do you know how to mine it?
With dynamite? Ok, do you know how to make dynamite? Can you build a
wagon and haul it? If you can't make dynamite build wagons, tame
horses, and haul the stuff, to where the coal is (or vice versa) how do
you make anything with iron? Assuming that you can do this, can you
make iron? Do you know how to construct a kiln? Do you know what you
need for iron manufacture besides coal, ore and a kiln? Without it you
will fail. If you can't make iron, you can't make an iron plow.
So you want to make a wooden plow. Fine. How do you cut the tree? Do
you know how to make stone tools? And while you are trying to re-
establish an agricultural society, what do you eat TODAY? Who gathers
food while you wait on the crop to mature. Do you know how to keep
pests from eating your crop before you eat it? A farmer spends most of
his time shooing the bugs off his crop. Besides, if you only have a few
people it actually might be more energy efficient to simply gather what is
out there rather than go to the trouble to plant food. Afterall, the
earliest farmers were physically WORSE off than their stone-age,
hunter-gatherer parents. The earliest farmers had a shortened life span.
Consider the reason that the Kalahari bushmen don't plant:
"Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called
primitive people, like the Kalashari Bushmen, continue to support
themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure
time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors.
For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only
12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza
nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated
neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when
there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"" ~ Jared Diamond, "The Worst
Mistake in the History of the Human Race," Discover, 1987, in in D. Bruce
Dickson, ed. Readings in Archaeology, (New York: West Publishing, 1994), p.
22
As I said above, you need to eat NOW. So do
you know how to make a bow and arrow?, How to make glue for the feathers?,
How to straighten the shaft?,How long to age the wood?, How to aim it?,How
to stalk
prey? Do you know how to balance a spear so the point will strike
first? Do you know what vegetables are poisonous? Do you know how to
remove the toxins? Consider this, yams are poisonous unless cooked.
Cycads can kill if not soaked in water for a long time and I believe
acorns can make you quite sick also unless you soak them. Do you know
how to start a fire without a match? (you need sticks which have been
modified.)
Now, given a more primitive preflood society, they could have
maintained a hunting capability but not an agricultural one. What all
this points to is that given a society who had only 8 survivors, they
would lose all their technical knowledge and could not pass it on to
their kids. It would take a long, long time before their children re-
invented the technology. What I envision about the 'primitive' time of
human evolution is that it is the re-development of technology. An
example: the Tasmanians were isolated for 8,000 years from all other
humans. They numbered 4,000 people with several different languages
and over time, even with 4000 people they were not able to maintain their
technology. 7000 years ago they made bone and stone tools and were not
different from the mainland aborigines, but about 3500 years ago, they
ceased making bone tools. And in spite of excellent fishing around the
island, they lost the ability to fish. Their huts were reduced to about
what Neanderthals
built. They apparently lost the ability to make boats and when they
re-invented the boat several thousand years later, they were so poor that
they couldn't last more than about 8 hours in the water before sinking.
Josephine Flood, "The Archeology of the Dreamtime, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1989), p. 173-187
If you were among only a few survivors of a catastrophy, you and your
children would be quickly reduced to naked savagery. And technology would
not re-develop rapidly, which is the real problem David has. There is no
way that if the earth were depopulated only 5-10,000 years ago that we
would have the technology we do today.<<
As
glenn
Foundation, Fall and Flood
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
http://www.flash.net/~mortongr/dmd.htm
Lots of information on creation/evolution
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Mar 15 2000 - 20:54:33 EST