Re: The wrong horse in evolution education

philtill@aol.com wrote (03 Apr 2006 13:00:48 -0400):
> 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 --

Hi Phil,

Thank you. Please accept my comments and criticisms as an honest contribution to
the discussion.

First I'd like to make a general comment, and afterwards a few more specific
remarks, which I'll intersperse between what you wrote. Your argument rests on
some assumptions which I have to challenge.

(1) You assume that I think the biblical authors knew some modern science. This
is a misunderstanding. I never claimed such an anachronism. Nor did I ever claim
God taught them (or is teaching us) anything about modern science. Science is
something we humans have to do on the basis of what now would be called
"methodological naturalism". The reason for this is mainly theological: God does
not want to impose on us faith in him, as this would destroy the basis of a
personal relationship with him. You probably agree with this (perhaps apart from
my claim that this is what I believe). I have never been taught any YEC ideas,
and have never had any sympathy with such ideas when I encountered them.

(2) You assume that God would not help his writing prophets to avoid errors
about things their surrounding culture was probably unaware of. This is what at
least contributed to the accommodation hypothesis. I don't see any convincing
evidence for this. And given point (1), I am really surprised that it is even
possible to find models harmonizing the ancient text with modern science,
without imposing any foreign meanings on words and expressions. Of course,
genres are important when interpreting texts, but the danger of determining
beforehand what genre a given text "must be" has to be carefully watched.

(3) You assume that a given biblical text can have only one single correct
meaning. If I agree with you that the main purpose and meaning of Gen. 1-2 is
theological, this doesn't close the issue altogether. I can still meaningfully
ask questions about historicity, about inspiration, about possible secondary
aims, etc. That biblical texts do occasionally have more than one meaning
becomes very clear in prophetical texts, and in particular with the way NT
authors sometimes quote the OT. Many of the prophecies we call "messianic" are
believed to have a primary application to the prophet's own time and situation.
Yet they also indicate something many centuries into the future, which these
prophets themselves could not have thought out, but Jesus and the apostles did
read these prophecies as pointing to NT times, and even into later eschatology.

(4) You assume (perhaps tacitly) that centuries-old traditional interpretations
must somehow be right, such as the belief that Gen.1:27 deals with Adam and Eve.
But a natural reading of the text conveys a continuous narrative going right
through Gen.2:4, which with its beautiful symmetry points both back to the
previous narrative, dealing with the whole creation, and forward to the
following one, dealing with some new story, restricted geographically and with
respect to generality. And scripture doesn't say all humans became sinners
through biological inheritance from Adam (cf. Rom.5:12ff), notwithstanding such
interpretational traditions.

> 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.

I don't have to rely on any more silences than you do with your interpretation.
You have to assume that Gen.1:27 really talks about Adam, and 2:7 about creating
the first humans. The text doesn't say either of these. Gen.2:7 uses
formulations which in other OT contexts are used for people having parents. You
have to assume that "adam" always means the person with the name "Adam", and
that in the NT, each mention of the "first man" indicates "Adam", although the
text doesn't always force us to do so.

> 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?

Are you sure Moses wrote this? I'm not suggesting any later author, of course,
but some earlier one. Moses had to have his sources for Genesis, and the
assumption that these were oral ones only is unfounded. By his time, people had
kept written records for perhaps two millenia in Mesopotamia (and Egypt and
perhaps India), even for quite everyday matters, and it seems quite unlikely
that the patriarchs didn't do so for their all-important experiences with God
and God's words to them, in Sumer and later. In fact, the argument from the
Mesopotamian colophon structures in the Genesis text seems to be quite convincing.

I don't know how much Moses would have known about early history, apart from the
texts he obtained from the fathers. I don't know either how far back we must go
to get to patriarchs who still clearly knew that there were other humans living,
apart from those descending from Adam. Of course, the question of pre-Adamites
is important for us on the scientific side, but neither for the ancients nor for
us is it important on the theological side (and most certainly not "amazingly
important"). And this clearly answers your above questions.

As far as historical completeness is concerned, I think you agree with me that
there is no such thing in the Bible. So we agree that we shouldn't expect it to
be different with the earliest Genesis narratives.

> 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.

Why do you call such indicators "wishful thinking" after you emphasized the
intuitive impression one is supposed to get when reading the text of Gen.1-2?
Like every other textual aspect such indicators have to be interpreted in the
immediate and wider contexts, up to the whole Bible and beyond.

> 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.

I agree with you that ancient literature uses literary compression, in
genealogies, biographies and elsewhere. In fact the Genesis genealogies are not
very long, just 10 generations from Adam to Noah and 10 from Shem to Abraham.
These may very well be compressed. Other biblical genealogies are much longer,
e.g. Luk. 3:23-38. But extending Adam's line by moving him backward until
archeology is satisfied just won't work. You would have to insert at least 1000
to 2000 unmentioned generations, not just a few dozen. But the Genesis text
clearly indicates a time and place for Adam, as Dick Fischer and Carol Ann Hill
showed: the Neolithic (and that's after about 8,000 BC) and Sumer.

> 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!

If you want to keep Cain an agriculturalist, you cannot date him earlier than
8,000 BC (while Adam would have lived perhaps 80,000 years ago - give or take
40,000?). Now, who is looking for "indicators discovered a posteriori in order
to justify a conclusion that was already necessary to support the paradigm"? I
don't see, in the text, any reason for such an enormous discrepancy. To me, it
seems a much more natural interpretation to have Cain build a city for the
(pre-Adamitic) Sumerians he met in the land of Nod.

> 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.

So, you are working with both what the text says and what it doesn't say, just
as I do. Why do we come to different conclusions, then? I think the crucial
point is, we have to be very careful not to automatically accept traditional
interpretations. What we have as the primary data is the text itself, in Hebrew,
as close to the original as we possibly can get. And we have the whole Bible as
a grand textual and theological context to consider. Now comes the
interpretation of this set of primary data. We can use other things, like all
interpretations produced throughout church history, as well as church and
secular history and modern science, but no traditional interpretations must be
taken as dogma.

> 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.

There is no need to equate early humans biblically defined as being "created in
God's image" with any anthropological definition of fossil Homo sapiens or even
any earlier hominids. They certainly aren't identical. God's image is not
fossilizable. What we possibly can get from genetics is a date or time period
for a most recent common ancestor of all living humans. We might also be able to
dig up archeological artifacts indicative of "religion": perhaps these, if
correctly interpreted, have something to do with "God's image".

> 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.

This model of having Adam postdated several ten thousand years creates more
conflicts with the Bible and with science than it solves.

And insisting that Adam was the first human is just grist to the mill of the
defenders of the warfare model of science versus the Bible. This is the reason I
started this thread. If we don't find reasonable models of harmonizing the
biblical text, as it stands, with modern science, we'll lose most of the
evangelical Christians to YEC or some other antievolution warfare model. And
we'll lose most scientists to contempt of the Bible due to the opposite warfare
model. In the accommodationist model of Genesis 1-11 being "broken myths", I see
something that is not far from an unnecessary surrender to the second warfare
model, which at most gives a Gould-like condescending nod to religion as a
"non-overlapping magisterium", if it keeps out of reality claims.

> 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

The text doesn't provide any direct evidence either way. What kind of
"honest-to-goodness evidence" do you expect might be possible to show up in the
text? But it isn't even decisive what the biblical authors understood, but how
God wanted his Word to be inscripturated for all future generations and cultures.

We have to keep in mind the divine inspiration of the text - in a biblical way,
of course, not like mechanical hand forcing or fall-from-heaven models. I am
still looking for a publication of a reasonable inspiration model. Any suggestions?

Here are just a few of the biblical indications that the prophets themselves did
not always understand all they were speaking about: Daniel: "knowledge shall
increase... I heard, but I did not understand... the words are shut up and
sealed until the time of the end... those who are wise shall understand" (Dan.
12:4,8-10). Jesus: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear
them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth"
(John 16:12-13). Paul speaks of "the mystery that was kept secret for long ages"
(Rom. 16:25, and in other places). Peter: "Concerning this salvation, the
prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and
inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them
was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent
glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you,
in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the
good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels
long to look" (1 Pet. 1:10-12).

Blessings,
Peter

-- 
Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)