Now I find out he's posted a good faith attempt at some clarity. Why didn't
you do this in the first place? I wasted a perfectly good caustic reply to
your perfectly caustic message telling me you wouldn't reply!
But now you've replied, and I have to put my six guns away.
Anyway, thanks for trying to reach clarity. You wrote:
<<Let me see if I understand your point. First we suppose that we
have agreed on a criteria for "human" (correct me if I'm wrong,
but I'm assuming human means made in the image of God,
a body-soul-spirit being). Now we take this criteria and apply
it to modern man. The criteria is satisfied, we take modern man
to be human. Tribesmen (whoever they might be) belong to the
same species as modern man, therefore they also are human.>>
Here is where Glenn's argument breaks down. He says, look at such and such a
tribe (a small subset of homo sapiens). They don't innovate. Does that mean,
Jim, they are subhuman, because innovation is your definition of humanity?
What's wrong is that we already KNOW these are homo sapiens. There may be
myriad reasons for non-innovation, but since they are part of the species we
know they have the same capacities as we all do. I once brought up the very
famous example of Ishi to Glenn. Give me one of those tribesmen and I'll have
him driving a car and writing incomprehensible legal briefs in a few weeks.
OTHO, when you deal with an ENTIRE SPECIES, like Neanderthal, and find no
evidence of modern human capacity, you've got another bowl of bones. It's a
different question. You're looking for clues of modern man on a species-wide
level.
That's why you can't compare the two. And that's why your term "civilizations"
was wrong. A civilization means something very specific. Websters has it as
"advancement in social culture, characterized by relative progress in the
arts, science and statecraft."
So you CAN'T have "civilizations" without innovation. They don't exist.
Jim