Re: So we're all related!

On Wed, 6 Oct 2004, Vernon Jenkins wrote:

> Gordon Brown wrote "There may be many Christians who will jump to a
> conclusion similar to Vernon's. This could lead to the rise of another urban
> legend to hurt the credibility of Christians."
>
> Gordon, I'm not in the business of creating 'urban legends', but rather in
> revealing scriptural truth. As you know, the traditional understanding of
> Genesis 6-9 is that God cleansed planet earth with a global flood that
> destroyed '...both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of
> the air...' (6:7). Many, of course, for what they would regard as reasons of
> scientific necessity no longer accept this. They insist that the purpose of
> this gripping narrative is to describe, not a global cataclysm, but merely
> an inundation of the land in which Noah and his family lived - this by
> translating the Hebrew word 'eretz' as 'land' rather than 'earth'. In so
> doing, of course, they ignore the illogicality of God requiring Noah to
> build a large ocean-going vessel when a simple trek with family and
> menagerie to higher ground would surely have been the kinder option. And
> ignoring also God's promise '...neither shall all flesh be cut off any more
> by the waters of a flood...' (9:11 - clearly false if a _local_ community
> had been intended).
>
> I believe these matters now assume a sharper significance in that the Author
> of this event, and its telling, is also the One whose powers and serious
> purposes are clearly demonstrated in the miraculous structure of Bible's
> opening verse. Can there really be any more doubt that it is Noah who is the
> nearest common ancestor of everyone alive today? Dr Olson and his team are,
> perhaps, not so far wide of the mark after all.

Vernon,

I have refuted your arguments for a global flood before. You seem to
ignore my refutations and repeat your claims. I will not at this time
repeat my refutations since that would get us off the subject at hand.

When I spoke of an urban legend, I was thinking of something like the
story that NASA had found Joshua's long day, which is completely false no
matter whether there was such a day. If you claim that the computations
about a common ancestor prove a global flood, that reasoning is just as
false even if there was a global flood.

If you are fortunate enough to have a few descendants, you probably have
or will have more grandchildren than children and more great grandchildren
than grandchildren, and so forth throughout all subsequent generations. So
the percentage of the world's population that is descended from you should
increase with each successive generation. Assuming that the world lasts
that long and that there are no permanently isolated populations, after a
few thousand years you should be the ancestor of 100% of the people alive
at that time. Maybe at that time someone will do a computation and
conclude that everyone on earth is descended from someone who lived in
Wales in 2004. Is it proper to conclude that that person was the only male
alive at that time? This is the sort of computation that I understand was
done in the research in question, and it was your conclusion, not the
authors', that the population was very small during the lifetime of our
common ancestor. In fact, he probably used the generally accepted
estimates of the world's population over the past few millenia as input
for his computations, not as the results.

Once we get back to the common ancestor of everyone, then all his
ancestors must be the ancestors of everyone also, and as you go back
through the previous generations, we all have more and more common
ancestors until we attain the point where everyone alive at that time
whose line hasn't died out is the ancestor of everyone alive today. I
think that this is the point of the research, which I have not actually
read.

If someone wanted to do a similar computation with another species rather
than with humans, similar results would be obtained, but the date would
vary from species to species rather than pointing to a common date for
one-digit populations of each species. Genetic studies would be more
relevant for the question that interests you.

Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
Received on Wed Oct 6 13:12:33 2004