Paul D. wrote:
>So obviously they were then descendents of the Biblical Noah, must have
>been capable of his technology and possessed his social capacity and
>capabilities to live and interact with others. As such, they knew of God
>and perhaps worshipped him. They must have kept the flood story and
>Noahic geneology accurate in their tradition for millions of years.
Glenn responded:
<<Possibly. or it could be that Moses was told the story by revelation long
after it had been lost to the world.>
I need some clarification, Glenn. It seems to me this part of your theory is
dependent on "lost evidence." Am I right? For example, in order to say
"possibly", you must believe in the ability to pass on, orally, a tradition
(there is no written tradition, of course). But there is no evidence for the
complex mode of lingual communication necessary for this to occur, either
anatomically or mentally. No expert to my knowledge believes there was such
complex communication back then. The beginnings of lingual capacity, perhaps,
but not modern language. 30K years ago is the "first time we can be sure that
people possessed articulate speech, whereas there is no way in which we can be
certain of this in the case of any earlier group." [Tattersall @245]
Also, farming was a recent event, as in 10 - 20,000 years ago (e.g., Lambert,
"Field Guide to Modern Man" p. 196). But Cain and Noah, for example, were
farmers. Is this, too, a matter of "lost evidence"? What experts believe
farming was present millions of years ago?
We see man in early Genesis with a sophisticated system of worship, language,
farming and technology. To deal with that, you don't point to any evidence of
same. Rather, you argue for incipient humanity. A bit of data here, one there,
as a "sign" that there was "humanity" in these hominids. Even accepting this
as signs of humanity, mankind, according to the biblical records at issue, was
much more than incipient. And the only man that meets that standard appeared
suddenly, explosively and...RECENTLY.
"In all evolution there is no transformation, no 'quantum leap' to compare
with this one. Never before has the life-style of a species, its way of
adapting, changed so utterly and so swiftly. For some fifteen million years
members of the family of man foraged as animals among animals. The pace of
events since then has been explosive...an instant on the evolutionary time
scale..." (Pfeiffer, "The Emergence of Society," McGraw-Hill 1977, pp. 28-29)
So it seems to me quite a leap from (say for the sake of argument) Broca's
area, to the conclusion that homo erectus or neanderthal was as fully
sophisticated as the man presented in Genesis.
Is that how your argument goes?
Jim