Glenn writes:
<< Then there is my view
which says human history is much much older and the flood was 5.5 million
years ago. I can not think of another approach to incorporate human
activities into a Christian world view.
Which option do you choose?>>
The option left out, which is a better interpretation of the data, one which
is not colored by an inner motive to shoot down a particular fundamentalist
view. One, in other words, without bias.
There is no naturalistic explanation for the sudden leap in modern man, even
if dated earlier than some believe. Glenn's flaw is in assuming naturalistic
common ancestry. But the data is not suggestive of this, absent bias. Here, I
will quote from Goodman's "The Genesis Mystery" (Times, 1983):
****
"After a century of painstaking investigation, the actual physical evidence to
document the theory of man's gradual evolution through a series of crude forms
to his present characteristics remains pathetically sketchy. Many of the
ancient hominid forms preceding the appearance of modern man do not seem to
represent a simple linear genetic sequence; in fact, as the late archaeologist
Louis Leakey believed, they may represent quite separate lineages. Modern man
is beginning to look like an evolutionary orphan." [p. 17]
Glenn is still wedded to a Darwinian framework, one shaped more by Victorian
biases than strict observation. In that regard, Goodman spends a chapter
discussing the man who almost beat Darwin to the punch, Alfred Russell
Wallace.
"To Wallace, the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist was
the origin of man, and it was on this problem that he and Darwin most differed
in their views. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin made it clear that he
saw the forces of evolution as solely responsible for mans physical appearance
and mental nature, including the human powers of memory, imagination, and
reason. Wallace, on the other hand, who published his ideas on human origins
in Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (1870), felt that natural
selection could not account for the 'difference of kind, intellectually and
morally, between man and other animals.' Natural selection, he argued, could
not provide an entire species with a brain so vastly disproportionate to its
requirements, as man's mental capacities exceeded those needed for survival."
Natural selection as a mechanism of evolution could only favor those
variations which successfully met existing needs; the claim that it could
invent and maintain talents in advance of necessity was putting the cart
before the horse." [p. 44]
Wallace suggest, "that a superior intelligence had guided the development of
man...and for a special purpose, just as man guides the development of many
animal and vegetable forms." [Id.]
So why didn't Darwin see this?
"Darwin's erroneous and culture bound opinion of primitive man stemmed from
his unquestioning acceptance of Lamarck's then-popular ladder concept of
evolution, where progress from simple to complex forms was inevitable. Under
this concept the varieties of man 'climbed up the evolutionary scale' from
black to brown to yellow to white. Quite unscientifically, Darwin gave the
different races of man hierarchical significance...Unfortunately, in prim
Victorian England, Darwin's thoughts about dark-skinned natives prevailed,
providing a new footing for racism and in turn imperialism and colonialism." [
pg. 45]
"Yet another of Wallace's perceptions about man and his origin that Darwin
demurred from involved man's emergence as a spiritual being....He felt that it
was 'utterly inconceivable' that man's development as a spiritual being
resulted from natural selection." [p. 47-8]
The better part of the book deals with the evidences of early sophistication
and spiritual awareness for modern man, but this actually cuts against Glenn's
conclusion about naturalistic origins. The further the gradualist [or, Goodman
notes, the punctuationist] goes back, the more puzzling sudden appearance of
modern complexity becomes:
"Any theory that hopes to provide a really satisfactory explanation of human
genesis must deal not only with the increasingly recalcitrant geographical and
chronological data, but also with modern man's physical and mental uniqueness,
including his inherent abilities and early technological sophistication, and
with the most provocative of all these issues, the seeming duality of man's
physical and spiritual nature." [p. 272]
The evolutionary explanation is not adequate: "Some real problems arise with
geographic circumstances and dates which indicate considerable overlapping
between one species and the next. These theories do not account adequately for
the sudden appearance in modern man of physical and mental traits which seem
to complement and reinforce each other as if by design. We don't find hominids
with chins and no foreheads, or foreheads and no anatomically modern vocal
tracts; we find all the elements of the modern package together in the form of
Homo sapiens sapiens or not at all. And flatly refusing to traffic in unknown
quantities, evolutionary theories do not attempt to deal with issue of man's
seeming duality." [p. 273]
Which leaves us an option Glenn fails to consider, and one Goodman proposes:
the non-naturalistic explanation [Goodman prefers the term "interventionism"].
Why does Glenn exclude this option? Not because the data compels him, but
because his prevailing bias is Naturalism.
Now consider that bias being passed along to the students in Professor
Morton's college classroom. Are they closer to, or further from, the truth?
Are they well served or not?
We will leave for another time the actual dates for modern man.
Jim