Since last December, I've been lurking. Better still, semi-lurking, i.e., I've had to leave some messages unread! Reasons: back surgery and a vacation in Florida. This calls for a mixture of pity and non-pity.
Anyway, in December I was involved in a few threads that perhaps I should respond to: De novo Adam, Animal ancestry of Adam's body, Creatio ex nihilo, as well as related matters in a few other threads.
At this late date (four months is very long in Internet, i.e., real, time) I shall respond to only a few statements others have made.
1. Concerning the question of biblical inerrancy that arose in connection with Hebrews 11:11 (Sarah's supposed seminal emission): I was disappointed to see that even those who disagreed with Denis's claim did say that yes, the Bible does contain errors. In my view, human beings do not and cannot possess the means to detect errors in the Bible. We can often, although not necessarily always, show that a claimed error is not in fact an error. But more importantly, we ought to understand that interpreting any part of the biblical text demands that we take into account the universe of discourse. This does *not* mean we assume the writers incorporated wrong scientific ideas of their day. Rather it means that when I say, "I feel *in my bones* that...." you do not assume I believe my brain is lodged in my bones and that what I really had a few months ago was not back surgery, but brain surgery. Well, Dick Bube and I argued this matter in a very long (and unusually structured) debate in the *Journal of the American Scientific Affiliation* in June, 1972. (Dick, the editor, took a poll and I "lost" by about the same large margin that McGovern lost to Nixon in the same year. And I had no respect for McGovern!)
2. Concerning Glenn's suggestion about the "dust" from which Adam was made: Glenn has suggested that much of our genetic code is what it is because the dust of Genesis 2 was the corpse of an animal; he states that the amount of decay--death of the animal or complete decay of the same material--is not important. I suppose we are getting fairly close. But I still do not want to rule out the other possibility, viz., that God created us so that we fit into this creation, and that the bizarre possibilities Glenn mentioned--leaves on our bodies to provide us food via photosynthesis, etc.--would not fit. In another thread, I suggested that if it is true that part of the Y chromosome can be shown to descend from father to son and that all human males descended from the same father (a claim made in *Nature* last November), then God would have provided Jesus with that *apparent* link to male ancestors. If he did this once, he could have done it another time--when he created Adam.--By the way, I am not willing to concede that what is presently called junk DNA is in fact useless. (This is the old Darwinian error of claiming that what we cannot understand--Darwin provided quite a few examples--proves the absence of divine design. Ironically, evolutionists have accused anti-evolutionists of invoking a God-of- the-gaps when present-day science does not explain a phenomenon.)
Russ
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e-mail: rmaatman@dordt.edu Home address:Russell Maatman 401 Fifth Ave. SE Dordt College Sioux Center, Iowa 51250Sioux Center, Iowa 51250 Home phone: (712) 722-0421