Re: The wrong horse in evolution education

 Hi Peter,
 
you wrote (in part):
 
> The only possibility I see at present of conforming to conditions 2) and 3) is:
> a) to dissociate the biblical Adam (Gen.2:7) from the first humans created in
> God's image (Gen.1:27);
> b) to combine the biological and psychological evolution of the first humans
> with their spiritual creation "in God's image" at a given point in time (no
> requirement of the first humans to have no biological parents!).
 
 
I appreciate your honesty and your well-thought arguments. I want to join with you in thinking this through, and it seems the best contribution I can make is to point out what I see as the basic problem with your (a), above, and its discussion in your subsequent replies. I don't think your arguments above will carry the day until this problem can be addressed better than has been done by anybody thus far --
 
While I definitely appreciate your reason to see Adam as belonging to (relatively recent) Sumer, there is nonetheless a very strong sense that one gets from the text (both OT and NT) that Adam was really the first human (in some sense, whether historical or figurative). In order to dissociate the Adam of Gen.2:7 from the first humans of Gen.1:27, you have to rely on some advantageous silences assumed to exist, interspersed among statements by the various biblical authors.
 
For example, if Moses meant to say that Adam was not the first human, he surely didn't go too far out of his way to make it perfectly clear. He was at best _silent_ on that topic. He didn't say anything like, "long after humans had been living on the Earth, then God made another man and called him Adam". It makes me wonder, if Moses understood that Adam wasn't the first, then why didn't he consider it important to say so? (Of course I understand the usual arguments from archeology, but I'm asking why the author himself wouldn't say something on a point that was so amazingly important!) On the other hand, if Moses *himself* didn't understand that Adam wasn't the first, then aren't I being too clever to believe God is telling me in this text something that He had hidden from the original author?
 
There are, of course, the classic "indicators" that people point to, such as "where did Cain find a wife?" But I can't see that these are really the strong indicators that they are made out to be. In fact, they really come across as wishful thinking -- indicators discovered a posteriori in order to justify a conclusion that was already necessary to support the paradigm. It makes more sense to see these "indicators" as being the normal literary technique of compression used in all ancient literature. If I'm not mistaken ancient creation accounts never go back more generations than what we see in Genesis, and they routinely compress things down for the sake of telling it in a repeatable, memorizable way. We see other examples of compression: Cain is cursed from the ground so that he cannot be an agriculturalist and must instead wander the earth, but in the very next verse we find him settled down building the city of Uruk in Sumer which was an entirely agricultural city.
  This can't possibly occur in one generation without throwing away the whole point of the text! So we can easily see that Moses, like *all* ancient authors, is compressing pre-history down to a few touchstone points to convey the message. Things like "where did Cain get a wife" are exactly the sort of textual phenomena that occur in a creation text with compression, and so these can't be taken woodenly to mean that Adam wasn't the first.
 
The better arguments for an Adam who wasn't first, it seems, are those that place him in Sumer, since we know homo sapiens came from Africa and lived there at least half of their history before some came out to populate everything else. This is of course what creates the dilemma that you are discussing.
 
Personally, I'd rather see an answer that recognizes Adam as truly the first universal man but places him anachronistically in Sumer as a literary technique (as just one example) than to dissociate him from the first homo sapiens. I think there are MANY possible answers different than this one, which have not yet been explored sufficiently. I can think of several more but I don't have time to type them all.
 
I don't think that any attempt to dissociate Adam from the first humans will work unless some honest-to-goodness evidence from the text can be produced that shows that the biblical authors really did understand that he wasn't first.
 
God bless!
Phil Metzger
 
 
 
Received on Mon Apr 3 13:01:43 2006