You Say You Want An Evolution!

[rogue06]

We already see human settlements far into the Americas from that time with places like Cactus Hill in Virginia likely dating from that time and Monte Verde way down in Chile being dated from this time and possibly even a good bit earlier. And then there is the evidence provided from genomes being sequenced as well.

As Charles Hodge, who wrote in What is Darwinism? that "Darwinism is atheism"^[1] (p.156), observed in his Systematic Theology: "The scriptures do not teach us how long men have existed on earth. Their tables of genealogy were [not] intended to prove ... how many years had elapsed between creation and the advent." He is far from alone what with a number of Biblical scholars (Green, Orr, Warfield etc.) also say that it is a mistake to attempt to use Genesis genealogies to determine the time at which Adam and Eve (or the first homo Sapiens, for that matter) actually lived.

And again, this all raises the possibility that there were what we would regard as humans living for along, long time. Cro-Magnons, now referred to as Early Modern Humans (EMH) date back to at least 48,000 years ago. This again leads us to the point that there could be a profound difference between what science calls human and what the Bible refers to human. "Biblical man" could have arose from when he was given a "God-breathed" soul and a type of consciousness (and conscience) that had not previously existed in any "pre-Adamic" man.

Of course Biblical man could still mate with others, and the the eternal souls could be passed down through their progeny. That there were other humans around would explain the Mark of Cain (why would he need an identifying mark when if there were no other humans just being an outsider would have been more than sufficient) and the fact that he founded a city.





1.Less well known is that in that work he did in fact allow for evolution, "If God made them it makes no difference so far as the question of design is concerned how he made them; whether at once or by a process of evolution." (p.95). He rejected naturalistic or materialistic views of evolution but accepted that evolution might be established and directed by God (i.e., theistic evolution).

At this point I just want to add that the idea that Adam and Eve may have descended from earlier ancestors is not some new, radical fringe view but rather has the support^[1] of a fairly large number of eminent conservative, orthodox theologians, scholars and preachers.

For instance, the great and highly respected Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong used the term "brute" and spoke of the brutish ancestry of human beings saying that such an ancestry was in no way incompatible with our excelling status as creatures in the image of God.

IIRC it is in his Systematic Theology (which has been a mainstay of Baptist theological education even today and still required reading in some conservative Christian colleges) where Strong drew an analogy with Christ's miraculous conversion of water into wine saying that

"The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to its creation."

And at the 17th Annual Sessions of the Baptist Congress held in the Delaware Baptist Church in Buffalo, New York during November of 1898 Strong stated

"That man is the offspring of the brute creation does not prevent him from being also the offspring of God."

Another well regarded Baptist, the Rev. Billy Graham, who is arguably the greatest evangelist of our time, is of a similar mind as Strong, stating in his autobiography Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (written with the help of David Frost)

"I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man ... I personally believe that it's just as easy to accept the fact that God took some dust and blew on it and out came a man as it is to accept the fact that God breathed upon man and he became a living soul and it started with some protoplasm and went right on up through the evolutionary process. Either way is by faith and whichever God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's relationship to God."

And this wasn't something that Graham has only recently come to believe. Nearly 50 years prior to this Graham is quoted in the United Church Observer in July of 1966 that



Benjamin B. Warfield, rightly regarded as the great apologist or champion of biblical inerrancy and whose influence can be seen in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (in that he was probably the most vocal advocate of that doctrine), held that there was nothing in the first chapters of Genesis that could not be properly interpreted in a way consistent with the evolutionary development of the present world. He explained that

"If under the directing hand of God a human body is formed at a leap by propagation from brutish parents [that is, per saltum evolution (evolution by mutation)], it would be quite consonant with the fitness of things that it should be provided by his creative energy with a truly human soul."

IOW, God created the matter of the universe with the forces of nature ex nihilo, through evolution he providentially formed man, and by a special act of mediate creation he created the soul of humans.

George Frederick Wright, who pastored Congregational churches in Vermont and Massachusetts before becoming professor and later professor emeritus of New Testament language and literature at Oberlin Theological Seminary, pointed out that Genesis truthfully portrayed "an ordered progress from lower to higher forms of matter and life" that left room for God's creation of life forms with "a marvelous capacity for variation" -- and for Adam and Eve as well.

He held that the biblical creation accounts were meant to teach theological truths, and thus should not be expected to reveal scientific knowledge.

The Rev. George Macloskie who wrote in his Theistic Evolution in 1898 that

"It has been recognized that man may have been both created and evolved, that his creation may have been effected under divinely directed evolution, either as a natural development or possibly as a development with supernatural incidents and expediated."

Elsewhere he remarked that "the theory of the Predamites does not affect the unity of the race" while simultaneously noting that the "Bible seems to set forth Adam as our first father."

James Orr, yet another influential defender of evangelical doctrine and a contributor to The Fundamentals, who was a vocal critic of theological liberalism with his writings and lectures upholding the doctrines of the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible, was also open to the idea. He once noted that



This view was echoed by others like William L. Poteat, President of Wake Forest University who defended the teaching of evolution as the "divine method of creation", arguing it was fully compatible with Baptist beliefs.

The last great conservative and utterly orthodox Christian thinker that I'll cite is G.K. Chesterton, who wrote in his classic of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy:

"IF evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time."

There are a good many others with the above list being anything but an exhaustive list.

A few others include the Congregational evangelist R. A. Torrey, one of the three editors of The Fundamentals^[2], the series of essays that gave its name to what came to be called "fundamentalism," and who accepted the idea of pre-Adamites.

Gleason Archer was yet another one who believed in pre-Adamism. Gleason writes in his 1985 book titled A Survey of Old Testament Introduction:

"To revert to the problem of the Pithecanthropus, the Swanscombe man, the Neanderthal and all the rest (possibly even the Cro-magnon man, who is apparently to be classed as Homo sapiens

And the well known Anglican cleric John R.W. Stott^[3] also believed that God could have created Adam out of some supposed pre-Adamite "hominid".

So it seems that I'm standing on pretty firm ground here.







1. or at the very least consider it a distinct, viable possibility

2. A.C. Dixon, was another editor of The Fundamentals), is cited much in the same way Charles Hodge is (see post #130 including the footnote) for his comments against "evolution" -- but his target was actually Spencer and the Social Gospel. As one biographer, Brena M. Meeham, wrote:

"Dixon upheld the possibility that Darwinian evolution could find a place in the Bible, with God as Evolver and evolution as his method of creation."

3. Stott was one of the authors of the Lausanne Covenant (a 1974 Christian religious manifesto promoting active world-wide Christian evangelism and one of the most influential documents in modern Evangelical Christianity. It was written and adopted by 2300 evangelicals at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, from which it takes its name). Time Magazine ranked John R.W. Stott among the top 100 MOST influential people in the world in 2005.

[rogue06]

At this point I just want to add that the idea that Adam and Eve may have descended from earlier ancestors so this is not some new, radical fringe view but rather has the support^[1] of a fairly large number of eminent conservative, orthodox theologians, scholars and preachers.

For instance, the great and highly respected Baptist theologian Augustus Hopkins Strong used the term "brute" and spoke of the brutish ancestry of human beings saying that such an ancestry was in no way incompatible with our excelling status as creatures in the image of God.

IIRC it is in his Systematic Theology (which has been a mainstay of Baptist theological education even today and still required reading in some conservative Christian colleges) where Strong drew an analogy with Christ's miraculous conversion of water into wine saying that

"The wine in the miracle was not water because water had been used in the making of it, nor is man a brute because the brute has made some contributions to its creation."

And at the 17th Annual Sessions of the Baptist Congress held in the Delaware Baptist Church in Buffalo, New York during November of 1898 Strong stated

"That man is the offspring of the brute creation does not prevent him from being also the offspring of God."

Another well regarded Baptist, the Rev. Billy Graham, who is arguably the greatest evangelist of our time, is of a similar mind as Strong, stating in his autobiography Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man (written with the help of David Frost)

"I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man ... I personally believe that it's just as easy to accept the fact that God took some dust and blew on it and out came a man as it is to accept the fact that God breathed upon man and he became a living soul and it started with some protoplasm and went right on up through the evolutionary process. Either way is by faith and whichever God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's relationship to God."

And this wasn't something that Graham has only recently come to believe. Nearly 50 years prior to this Graham is quoted in the United Church Observer in July of 1966 that



Benjamin B. Warfield, rightly regarded as the great apologist or champion of biblical inerrancy and whose influence can be seen in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (in that he was probably the most vocal advocate of that doctrine), held that there was nothing in the first chapters of Genesis that could not be properly interpreted in a way consistent with the evolutionary development of the present world. He explained that

"If under the directing hand of God a human body is formed at a leap by propagation from brutish parents [that is, per saltum evolution (evolution by mutation)], it would be quite consonant with the fitness of things that it should be provided by his creative energy with a truly human soul."

IOW, God created the matter of the universe with the forces of nature ex nihilo, through evolution he providentially formed man, and by a special act of mediate creation he created the soul of humans.

George Frederick Wright, who pastored Congregational churches in Vermont and Massachusetts before becoming professor and later professor emeritus of New Testament language and literature at Oberlin Theological Seminary, pointed out that Genesis truthfully portrayed "an ordered progress from lower to higher forms of matter and life" that left room for God's creation of life forms with "a marvelous capacity for variation" -- and for Adam and Eve as well.

He held that the biblical creation accounts were meant to teach theological truths, and thus should not be expected to reveal scientific knowledge.

The Rev. George Macloskie who wrote in his Theistic Evolution in 1898 that

"It has been recognized that man may have been both created and evolved, that his creation may have been effected under divinely directed evolution, either as a natural development or possibly as a development with supernatural incidents and expediated."

Elsewhere he remarked that "the theory of the Predamites does not affect the unity of the race" while simultaneously noting that the "Bible seems to set forth Adam as our first father."

James Orr, yet another influential defender of evangelical doctrine and a contributor to The Fundamentals, who was a vocal critic of theological liberalism with his writings and lectures upholding the doctrines of the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible, was also open to the idea. He once noted that



This view was echoed by others like William L. Poteat, President of Wake Forest University who defended the teaching of evolution as the "divine method of creation", arguing it was fully compatible with Baptist beliefs.

The last great conservative and utterly orthodox Christian thinker that I'll cite is G.K. Chesterton, who wrote in his classic of Christian apologetics, Orthodoxy:

"IF evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time."

There are a good many others with the above list being anything but an exhaustive list.

A few others include the Congregational evangelist R. A. Torrey, one of the three editors of The Fundamentals^[2], the series of essays that gave its name to what came to be called "fundamentalism," and who accepted the idea of pre-Adamites.

Gleason Archer was yet another one who believed in pre-Adamism. Gleason writes in his 1985 book titled A Survey of Old Testament Introduction:

"To revert to the problem of the Pithecanthropus, the Swanscombe man, the Neanderthal and all the rest (possibly even the Cro-magnon man, who is apparently to be classed as Homo sapiens

And the well known Anglican cleric John R.W. Stott^[3] also believed that God could have created Adam out of some supposed pre-Adamite "hominid".



So it seems like I'm standing on firm ground here.







1. or at the very least consider it a distinct, viable possibility

2. A.C. Dixon, was another editor of The Fundamentals), is cited much in the same way Charles Hodge is (see post #130 including the footnote) for his comments against "evolution" -- but his target was actually Spencer and the Social Gospel. As one biographer, Brena M. Meeham, wrote:

"Dixon upheld the possibility that Darwinian evolution could find a place in the Bible, with God as Evolver and evolution as his method of creation."

3. Stott was one of the authors of the Lausanne Covenant (a 1974 Christian religious manifesto promoting active world-wide Christian evangelism and one of the most influential documents in modern Evangelical Christianity. It was written and adopted by 2300 evangelicals at the International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, Switzerland, from which it takes its name). Time Magazine ranked John R.W. Stott among the top 100 MOST influential people in the world in 2005.

I guess I should also mention that, in his commentary on Genesis (Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary

[seer]

I guess I should also mention that, in his commentary on Genesis (Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary

So again rogue, what happened to the descendants of the soulless?

[rogue06]

So again rogue, what happened to the descendants of the soulless?

They were absorbed or died (see Genesis 6-9).

[seer]

They were absorbed or died (see Genesis 6-9).

Died how? A flood?

[tabibito]

A flood is not impossible. A small and localised population (in relative terms - not forgetting that city) of early humans could have been subjected to a calamity that would have been subjectively described in the terms presented in the Bible: always provided that it occurred in the distant past. The chronology provided by the Bible is clearly wrong, but that would not mean that no flood happened. With the 200,000 year barrier now breached, possibilities are broadened. Errors exist in the genesis record, it is now just a matter of their extent.

[Amidoingit]

Welcome to Tweb

The idea of "living fossils" is a bit of a misnomer and misleading. Here are two articles discussing the issue:

The Falsity of Living Fossils

The Rise and Fall of the Living Fossil

For a more specific example I discuss just how much coelacanths have changed over time in this post.

Another example are crocodiles or crocidilians which had some pretty wild ancestors in their lineage since at various times they filled a variety of ecological niches that they don't occupy today. For instance, some ancient species were bipedal, some were arboreal (lived in trees), some lived in extremely arid environments, some had boar-like tusks, some were herbivores or ate grubs, and some had fish-like tails^[1]










1. Here's a cool article about five strange types of extinct crocs discovered in 2009 in Niger with such nicknames as "BoarCroc," "DogCrock," "RatCroc," "PancakeCroc," "DuckCrock"

Interesting! Thank you for the welcome and the information!

[Amidoingit]

Back to Adam, how on earth do you get past 16,000 years even with gaps in the Biblical genealogy?



I don't think that evolution can be reconciled with the Biblical account of the creation of man, so I assume that you would choose Scripture over evolutionary theory.

Just a thought.

What if living is only a finite term and one can only live when death is certain? If Adam and Eve were immortal in the garden of Eden then maybe they weren't technically living and Adams age only starts to be counted after he leaves the garden and will eventually die. After all isn't Eve given her name as mother of all living after they leave the garden? Did Adam and Eve even try to procreate in the garden? Do we count the age of any immortal being?

What if they lived in the bubble of the garden for 4.5 billion years while the rest of the world was evolving and had Cain 130 years AFTER leaving the garden? In some ways it makes more sense (and gives them a bit more credit) then doing the ONE thing God said not to do pretty much immediately.

Just a thought and there's probably a verse I'm forgetting that poo poos everything I wrote. Please be kind.

[tabibito]

Just a thought.

What if living is only a finite term and one can only live when death is certain? If Adam and Eve were immortal in the garden of Eden then maybe they weren't technically living and Adams age only starts to be counted after he leaves the garden and will eventually die. After all isn't Eve given her name as mother of all living after they leave the garden? Did Adam and Eve even try to procreate in the garden? Do we count the age of any immortal being?

What if they lived in the bubble of the garden for 4.5 billion years while the rest of the world was evolving and had Cain 130 years AFTER leaving the garden? In some ways it makes more sense (and gives them a bit more credit) then doing the ONE thing God said not to do pretty much immediately.

Just a thought and there's probably a verse I'm forgetting that poo poos everything I wrote. Please be kind.

I have been avoiding the saying of that (remote) possibility, but it does make sense in the light of the Biblical record - Eden being paradise and all that.

[rogue06]

A flood is not impossible. A small and localised population (in relative terms - not forgetting that city) of early humans could have been subjected to a calamity that would have been subjectively described in the terms presented in the Bible: always provided that it occurred in the distant past. The chronology provided by the Bible is clearly wrong, but that would not mean that no flood happened. With the 200,000 year barrier now breached, possibilities are broadened. Errors exist in the genesis record, it is now just a matter of their extent.

I think that calling saying the chronology is "wrong" is going to far if you consider that providing a chronological exact account might not have been the point or a concern. It might be more accurate to say that our attempts to use it it a manner it was not intended to use might be what is wrong.

As Paul instructed it is perhaps best that we

nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.

[tabibito]

I think that calling saying the chronology is "wrong" is going to far if you consider that providing a chronological exact account might not have been the point or a concern. It might be more accurate to say that our attempts to use it it a manner it was not intended to use might be what is wrong.

As Paul instructed it is perhaps best that we

nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith.

That the Bible provides a sequence of timed events that lead to a conflict with the geological record is inescapable. Honestly answering the questions arising from that conflict becomes necessary.

[rogue06]

That the Bible provides a sequence of timed events that lead to a conflict with the geological record is inescapable. Honestly answering the questions arising from that conflict becomes necessary.

A sequence, yes. But not necessarily one that is meant to be exactly measured.

[tabibito]

A sequence, yes. But not necessarily one that is meant to be exactly measured.

On that I would agree - while at the same time acknowledging that there is no Biblical support for that opinion.
That certain parties do promote those measurements as accurate creates more difficulties than does the text.

[rogue06]

On that I would agree - while at the same time acknowledging that there is no Biblical support for that opinion.
That certain parties do promote those measurements as accurate creates more difficulties than does the text.

To a point but as I noted in a footnote back in post #59

2.

So there is scriptural evidence that keeping things in precise historical, sequential order was not a priority.

[tabibito]

To a point but as I noted in a footnote back in post #59

So there is scriptural evidence that keeping things in precise historical, sequential order was not a priority.

Hmm. At least some errors exist because the authors weren't overly excited about exactitude.
I don't have a problem with that, but there are plenty who would.