Re: The wrong horse in evolution education

In a message dated 4/14/2006 10:41:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
drsyme@cablespeed.com writes:
But they want Adam to be early enough to try to make him the predecessor of
all human beings, and late enough to fit the biblical evidence for when Adam
existed.

And that is the problem, there is no model that is going to satisfy both
conditions.
I must respectfully differ with Dick's (and others') model that Genesis dates
Adam. I'm aware of the arguments but I don't agree with them, because I'm
convinced that there must be a large gap between Adam and Seth. I think there
is extremely strong textual evidence that supports this.

(1) Cain is cursed from farming and complains that he must become a
wanderer, and yet two verses later we see him building a city, which is an
agricultural undertaking. This can't possibly represent one generation without
completely flushing the whole point of the curse on Cain. Instead, "Cain" must
represent an entire line of descent -- mankind was cursed to wander in "the land of
Nod" (literally "land of wandering") and then **eventually** formed
civilization in Sumeria when men became farmers.

(2) The line of descent following from Cain can't realistically be taken as
literal. The names follow a definite pattern of chiasms and parallels
compared to the line of Seth. This is too pat to be real history, and simply must be
a literary construction. In fact, when you organize the chiasms as single
"days", the 9 generations of Seth's line in parallel with the 6 generations of
Cain's line are organized into 7 days, with Noah (whose name significantly
means "rest") being the 7th day.

Day Seth's line Cain's line
----- -------------- ----------------

1 Seth ---- (no parallel in Cain's
line for 1st day of each triad)

2 Enosh Cain (chiasm - a criss cross of
variants of the same name)
              Kenan Enoch

3 Mahalalel Irad (chiasm - a criss cross of
variants of the same name)
              Jared Mehujael

===========================

4 Enoch ---- (no parallel in Cain's line
for 1st day of each triad)

5 Methuselah Methushael

6 Lamech Lamech

===========================

7 Noah ="rest" ---- (no parallel in Cain's line for
Sabbath)

===========================

Then: 3 sons 3 sons

This construction seems organized to parallel the 7 days of Genesis 1, with
its two triads and a Sabbath to crown them.

(3) Comparison of the meanings of names in the two columns tells a story that
Seth's line is serving God whereas Cain's line is building cities, fighting,
living cursed lives. It is a theological message about the people of God
versus the people of the world. There is no indication that it is literal on
Cain's side, where no birth or death dates are given. It has "framework" written
all over it.

(4) The anthropological accomplishments of the 3 sons at the end of Cain's
line are too sweeping to be the result of 3 real brothers. 1. Pastoral
nomadism, 2. metallurgy, 3. oral-history telling (musicians). Plus, their names rhyme
and have meanings of the exact same things that they invented. There is no
way this is literal! Again, the point is theological/anthropological. It
teaches us that the people of the world are making progress in civilization and
yet God's curse continues to be worked out in their lives, leading to the
judgement (Noah's flood).

(5) The daughters and wives in Cain's line aren't necessarily literal,
either. They have names whose meanings relate to what women are doing in Genesis 5
(tempting the sons of God), and so their presence in this geneology is to set
up Genesis 5. Again, the point is to tell us about the course of the world in
contrast to the people of God.

(6) The parallels of the two lines are brought out further when you see that
both Lamechs speak and the messages they give represent the themes of the two
lines. Seth's Lamech prophecies salvation, for which his line is patiently
waiting. Cain's Lamech speaks of how the curse is becoming worse instead of
better.

With all this intentional literary framework, I can't see any reason that we
are forced to put Adam into the neolithic. It is clearly a literary
construction in its entirety. It is clearly meant to teach theological and
anthropological messages. I'm not saying it isn't real history, too, but if so then it
is a very highly stylized and condensed version of history, not something you
could ever possibly date. This should be very obvious from the text once we
see how it is structured. Because of this, Adam could be any distance
arbitrarily far back in history or pre-history. Considering his role in original sin,
I strongly feel that he is intended to be seen as the head of all humanity,
and therefore not recent at all.

It makes sense that, if there is going to be a gap in the history, then that
gap would occur in the very earliest part of the story where the author had no
direct oral history of what came earlier and he had to write from pure
inspiration alone. Of course, God can give the author any amount of detail that He
wants to give, but on the other hand it makes sense to understand that if we
so see a gap then this is because God didn't choose to give lots of detail in
this earliest part.

So, while Dick has a great deal of awesome ideas in his model, I will just
disagree on this point regarding the earliest two generations (Adam and Seth)
and their relationship to Cain's line. This observation about Adam could be
consistent with everything else Dick says from Seth on down. This would also
solve many folks' concerns about original sin.

I remember how Dick was artfully chiding Glenn a couple months ago about
being locked into an interpretation. Is it possible that many of us have been
likewise locked into an interpretation about Adam and unwilling to revise our
models? Personally, I like the idea of having models so we can be definite in
our discussions, but I don't like the idea of having a static model that can't
change or be thrown out completely from time to time. Models are supposed to
be changing -- that's why science works. I'd like to suggest that we not get
too locked in to any model of Adam.

God bless!
Phil Metzger
Received on Sat Apr 15 00:16:26 2006