>-----Original Message-----
>From: Howard J. Van Till [mailto:hvantill@novagate.com]
>Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 2:43 PM
>To: Glenn Morton
>Cc: asa@calvin.edu
>Subject: Re: Where is man?
>
>
>Glenn,
>
>Why am I not surprised to see your reply?
And what is this comment about? Should a person sit idly by while others
critize his ideas? I won't. Maybe you will, but then I see that you didn't
sit still for the same treatment because you replied when I criticized your
position. Should I make the same comment about you?
Or maybe I should note that at the Nature of Nature conference you actually
encouraged me to continue looking along the lines I am. Maybe your comment
surprised me in light of your statement to me face to face! If my approach
has no merit as you suggest, then you were entirely wrong to say anything
nice about the approach.
Why don't we talk the data and its conformance to the details of the
Biblical account rather than wondering why each other replied?
>1. Discovering that it is essentially impossible to find a one-to-one
>correspondence between any particular terrestrial flood event and the
>Genesis Flood narrative--read as if it were a chronicle of such an
>event--is
>neither surprising nor disturbing to me.
But it is to me. What does this say of inspiration? Is God so powerless that
he can't even inspire true accounts of what happened in the past? I for one
won't worship such a weakling.
>
>While the human trauma of actual flood experiences in the greater
>Mesopotamian region may help us to understand why flood narratives
>functioned as they did in Ancient Near Eastern cultures (as dramatic
>vehicles for reflecting on divine judgment and divine/human relationships
>generally) I see no basis for the expectation that the details Genesis 6-9
>should correspond to any one particular flooding event.
That is exactly what I said was your out. The details of the account don't
matter. If they don't matter, upon what basis do we figure that the account
is inpired by an all-powerful God who can raise a man from the dead? Why
should this book, which can't get simple history correct lay a claim on my
(or anyone's life) as being the record of God's interaction with humanity?
>
>2. Does water flow uphill in Mesopotamia? No, Glenn, I presume that physics
>applied then as now.
>
>> So what you do is decide that the details of the
>> account don't matter. If that is true, if the details truly
>don't matter to
>> the truth of the story, then the account might very well not be about a
>> flood but about a country bumpkin going to the big city.
>
>3. You and I and many others have gone round and round on this
>matter of the
>truth of various biblical stories.
I really do appreciate the blunt honesty here--I like it when someone
doesn't try to avoid the clear consequences of their view by saying that the
story is true when it clearly isn't under that person's interpretation.
The question is, what is the Flood
>narrative about? If it is assumed to be a chronicle of a particular
>Mesopotamian or global flood event, then the narrative might well be
>declared to be false.
Under the above assumptions, we agree. My problem is that I can't see why
an all-powerful God can't even get a simple country bumpkin in ancient
Israel to tell us the truth about:
1. Adam and Eve as real people and the first parents,
2. the details of Eve's creation
3. the details of the fall
4. the details of the temptation
5. the genealogies
6. the flood
7. the origin of languages
Given that record, one must wonder if Abraham is real--maybe he too is a
story of a hero-king which has similar functions in Hebrew culture to
stories like Scorpion in Egyptian culture (Scorpion was a person)
If, however, it is taken as a reflection on the
>character of the divine/human relationship--written in typical Ancient Near
>Eastern literary style--then it is possible that some profound truths are
>conveyed by this narrative.
Then I see no reason to believe that Abraham is any different--he is a
reflection of the divine/human relationship, as is David. One can play this
game until we have nothing left of reality and we are then left with a God
who inspired a book that got NOTHING correct!
>
>4. You seem to suggest that there are only two possibilities for the
>character of the Genesis Flood narrative. It is either, (1) an
>accurate (by
>modern historiographic standards) chronicle of a particular Mesopotamian
>flooding event, or it is (2) useless fluff, perhaps a silly story "about a
>country bumpkin going to the big city." As long as these are the only two
>alternatives offered, reflection on what Genesis 6-9 might
>contribute to our
>understanding of the divine/human relationship will be effectively stopped.
The problem is in the nature of inspiration. If God's inspiration makes no
difference in what the Hebrews wrote compared with the writings of other
ancient cultures, of what value is the Hebrew writings? In that case, I
would see little to recommend a belief in the Bible.
>
>
>> [skip some detail]
>
>> All I am asking for is a mere 3 million year gap
>> between the first appearance of man, and the first appearance of
>EVIDENCE of
>> man--a smaller gap than any of those above. Why exactly is this an
>> unreasonable expectation, Howard? Or do you not believe in statistics?
>
>5. Becoming better informed about the formational history of modern humans
>is a worthy enterprise. You are well justified, Glenn, to ask the Christian
>community to become more aware of what is known about this.
>
>Surely there were ancestors to modern humans 6 million years ago,
>although I
>doubt very much that their cultural development was sufficient for them to
>be the modern human characters in the Genesis 6-9 narrative.
Why? Bias? Where does it say that mankind always looked like us or that
mankind must have a brain of over 1000 cc to be normal? That simply isn't
the case. I can point you to a guy with a brain of approximately 107 cc who
has normal intelligence.
"'There's a young student at this university," says Lorber, 'who has an IQ
of 126, has gained a first-class honors degree in mathematics, and is
socially completely normal. And yet the boy has virtually no brain.' The
student's physician at the university noticed that the youth had a
slightly larger than normal head, and so referred him to Lorber, simply
out of interest. 'When we did a brain scan on him,' Lorber recalls, 'we
saw that instead of the normal 4.5-centimeter thickness of brain tissue
between the ventricles and the cortical surface, there was just a thin
layer of mantle measuring a millimeter or so. His cranium is filled
mainly with cerebrospinal fluid." ~Roger Lewin, "Is Your Brain Really
Necessary," Science, Dec. 12,1980, p. 1232.
So, this guy with the honors degree has the brain the size of a rheusus
monkey!!!!! Intelligence is not to be found in brain size, it is to be found
in intelligence. Daniel Lyon, an Irishman, had a cranial capacity of about
650 cc (1 lb 8 oz brain) yet was normal in intelligence. (Guiness Book of
World Records, 1996, p. 14). Such a brain is about the size of a gorilla.
Yet this guy lived in the early 1900s.
Concerning cultural development, we really don't know what the non-stone
technology of ancient peoples really was. How will we ever know if ancient
man engaged in fishing like some Aborigines do? Consider this:
"The webs of many tropical spiders can be rolled into very strong twine or
used as a sort of self-adhesive binding material (a sort of prehistoric
Scotch tape). Mallanpara Australian Aboriginal children used to fish for
tiddlers with a very short line-cum-bait made from spider webs. Their method
showed that the principle used by one species to catch its own prey could be
taken over and restructured to catch a completely different prey." Jonathan
Kingdon, Self-made Man, (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.,1993), p. 183
Do you think we will find a spider silk in the hands of a skeleton? We will
never know about things like this because everything rots. There is good
circumstantial evidence for bags with which to carry things as long ago as 2
million years, but we will never prove that there really were bags. By the
reasoning applied by your dismissal of my hypothesis, you would have to say
that humans didn't make bags until around 20,000 years ago, which is
entirely a silly thing to believe.
But we will know this. Some australopithecus from 3 million years ago, was
smart enough to see an australopithecine face in a naturally occurring
pebble and carry it 4 kilometers back to his cave. That requires much more
intelligence (and I might add, artistic culture) than any chimp has. E. I.
Eiztman picked up this stone during excavation of Makapansgat because it
resembled a human face. What he didn't notice was that if you turned it over
it resembled an australopithecine face! Raymond Dart writes:
"A complete perceptual transformation had taken place. The two little
rounded 'eyes' retained their visual status though their contours looked
more square and adult. The huge 'brain' and ridiculously pinched infantile
'mouth' that had involuntarily prevented us sapient observers from
orientating it otherwise, were now replaced by a dwarfed, flattened, and
indented 'skull-cap', above a broadly-grinning, robust and typical
australopithecine 'face'. Its broad 'cheeks' and gaping 'mouth' have become
so wide that even the total absence of nostril openings would have been
incapable of preventing any perceptive Australopithecus from recognizing it
as anything other than a caricature of one or another of his extremely
flat-faced male or female relatives in a positively hilarious mood.
"The 'facial proportions' from this new aspect are thus in excellent
general agreement with those that reconstructional efforts have caused each
modern artist, with minor variations, to produce for Australopithecus. This
concordance of itself is sufficient justification of the inference that
conceptual processes of a similar nature caused an australopithecine to
transport the pebble to the cave at Makapansgat. In addition, the curious
and to some extent corroborative fact is that once one admits the
possibility that an Australopithecus had the intellectual ability to detect
the presence of a face on this alien natural stone, then the social
responses that capacity evoked, follow. The pebble would have had no point
without an ability on his associate's part to comprehend and share the
emotional reactions, the puzzlement and amusement, that the discoverer had
had. And from this it may also be deduced that he and his fellows at the
australopithecine phase of human evolution had already reached a humanoid
level of self-realisation and self-awareness." ~ R.A. Dart, "The Waterworn
Australopithecine Pebble of Many Faces from Makapansgat," South African
Journal of Science, 70(June 1974), pp 167-169, p. 168
Of course, in spite of this data, you want to say that hominids of that era
had no culture or intelligence!
However, I
>would argue that such considerations are entirely irrelevant to the Flood
>narrative. Knowledge regarding the culture (religion, literature,
>technology, etc.) of the Ancient Near Eastern civilizations would, however,
>be essential for us to begin to understand how this narrative functioned in
>its own time and place.
As an untrue story. [ironic tone on] My, my, God's involvement with mankind
really makes a difference and changes things.[ironic mode off]. Are we
supposed to tell that God inspired the Bible because of its falsity? THat
really doesn't make any sense to me and we would never apply such a standard
in any other area of life, except in regards to our religion.
There are hundreds of untrue stories from primitive cultures which we reject
as having no value, yet we think that the Bible does (I am aware that you
indicated in our last exchange that you believe that stories from other
cultures may have metaphysical value).
glenn
see http://www.glenn.morton.btinternet.co.uk/dmd.htm
for lots of creation/evolution information
anthropology/geology/paleontology/theology\
personal stories of struggle
>
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